


Come Once Again and Love Me

by laventadorn



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Snape smokes, Time Travel Fix-It, background Sirius Black/Remus Lupin - Freeform, previous James/Lily - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2012-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-25 22:22:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 179,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13844247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laventadorn/pseuds/laventadorn
Summary: Severus wakes up in the afterlife expecting something rather different than being almost-seventeen again. But wait - Lily's come back, too - from 1981? Perhaps it's a second chance... but for what?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a much older fic I wrote in 2011, previously archived only on FFN. I'm transferring it here to finally have it cross-posted. It has not been edited from its original version. It was never Britpicked, and especially the swearing (of which there is a lot) is apparently rather unrealistic. Although I have attempted some edits, I ask that you read with that in mind and kindly offer me some leeway, considering that extensive edits are currently beyond my power ♥
> 
> The 'M' rating might be overstating things, such as language and violence, but I'd rather over-rate than under-rate. 
> 
> The fic is complete and should be posted in its entirety fairly quickly.

"Look . . . at . . . me . . . "

And the boy did, that was the wonder; perhaps it was such a simple thing, it didn't matter if he did what Severus wanted . . . but the inside of the shack was too dim for colors to thrive and the boy's eyes were only dark. With that face, it might have been his father looking down at Severus. Was that how Potter Senior would have looked at him, as if he didn't know whether to feel horrified or triumphant?

Was that how Lily would have looked at him, as he lay dying?

Everything slid away from him, like water down a drain, like emotions in the grip of Occlumency, like memories into the mind of a Leglimens, eddies into the past of a heart you joined to, however briefly; because as any Leglimens knew, the eyes really were the gateway into the soul.

* * *

Darkness. Yes, he'd have expected it to be dark.

A faint coldness. That, too, was expected . . .

He had a body. He could feel the heaviness in his limbs . . . it felt remarkably like the lethargy of sleep. A soft thing beneath his shoulder blades, the curve of his spine, his hips, thighs, legs; he could feel the hollowed-out feeling he always got in his stomach when he lay on his back.

Was it a bed? A pretty dreadful one. Springs were poking at him. Not expected, precisely, but not surprising. It would figure that features of his childhood would furnish his miserable afterlife.

And there was a—smell. Of . . . mothballs?

Severus opened his eyes.

A ceiling with a crack that looked like the Nile on maps of Africa. Stained, peeling wallpaper. A bare, narrow window, its glass sweating with condensation and prickled with the imprints of dirty snow that had clumped on the sill outside. A radiator that clanked and wheezed beneath it. Dust, books, a peeling wardrobe. A Hogwarts trunk flung open, unwashed robes spilling out into the dust on the floor. And that stench of mothballs and cabbage.

It was his bedroom from childhood.

Severus sat up, jabbing himself anew with springs. The room did not change, even though it was being loathed from a different angle. From his feeling of rage-tinted confusion, he supposed he'd been expecting it to turn into another place.

Was this Hell? If the devil were a mind-skimmer, he'd missed his mark; Severus had hated this miserable fucking place, but there were many stronger contenders for moments in his life that could factor as a playground of eternal torment. Was it Purgatory, then?

Severus stood up from the bed. Something felt odd. Perhaps it was the school robes? He'd forgotten how itchy they were. He'd also forgotten the way he'd skulked about the house in his school clothes because all his second-hand Muggle clothing was the wrong size.

He gently prodded at his neck, then smoothed it with his whole hand. Unbroken skin. He'd never kept a mirror in his room, so he went down the abrupt hall to the loo.

The face looking back at him in the spotted mirror over the sink was that of an adolescent.

Severus stared. He shut his eyes, rubbed them with his hand, and then stared again. He thought about turning in a circle and clapping his hands, an old and stupidly superstitious way of warding off evil. But in the end he just stood there, staring, thinking . . . nothing. His mind was a throbbing blank.

Then it kicked into gear again, like the radiator would sometimes do when it choked on its own steam. God, he hadn't used the radiator in years—not as a grown-up. Because he was supposed to be a grown-up, supposed to be thirty eight years old, and dead after halfheartedly losing a tussle to a great giant snake who'd ripped his throat out, leaving him to die in a lot of blood and agony.

He scored his nails along the backs of his arms, out of reflex; but it was only the ghost of the memory, that feeling of the venom scalding the blood in his veins. He supposed he must have bit down on the capsule he'd embedded in his teeth, or it wouldn't have been over so quickly . . . or maybe it would had; maybe he'd bled to death, a puncturing of the jugular vein . . . why the Dark Lord hadn't just hit him with his favorite curse, Avada Kedavra, Severus couldn't say, but what a poor moment to depart from tradition: the Killing Curse would have placed Severus quite unable to give the boy what he'd needed.

Albus had said the Dark Lord had always been his own worst enemy. Severus didn't think the Headmaster had meant it so literally. For such a megalomaniac mastermind, the Dark Lord sure kept shooting himself in the foot. Had the boy defeated him? Or had he died, like Severus, before the end was over?

None of it mattered, though, not anymore. Severus had died; he was certain of that, and when you died, you no longer had to give a shit about life; that was the deal. The main thing on Severus' mind at the moment was his presence in this absolute farce. He had spots on his face instead of lines. It was surprising to see how smooth his face looked if he relaxed his scowl.

Well, he wasn't going to find answers gazing at himself. He knew that stringy hair and monstrous nose and indignant scowl far too well, anyway.

He went back to his bedroom, its clanking radiator and mothball smell, and sat down at his wretched mess of a desk. When the chair gave a disquieting creak, he got up, and found himself on nose-level with a calendar.

Unless he'd forgotten to change his calendar at some point—which, knowing himself, was a possibility—it was December 1976. For some reason, he had circled the thirty-first with a thick black marker. For what daft purpose? Who gave a fuck about the New Year?

He sank down onto the bed again. The room was cold, even with the radiator guttering steam. This chill was different from dungeon cold. It was shitty-insulation-cold.

He wrapped himself in his dusty duvet and rested his head against the wall, staring at the calendar.

December 1976.

Perhaps he had underestimated this place. If that calendar were to be believed, this was the representation of a day when he had already lost Lily for the first of many times.

* * *

 

_December 23, 1976_

Perhaps it was a chance to relieve his life.

Severus _almost_ refrained from thinking scornfully that it was a chance many people would die for, since it brought his entire life dangerously close to a being little more than a dreadful fucking pun. Especially when the outcome of the situation was being sixteen again. The only thing Severus hated more than being sixteen in the first place was being sixteen _again_.

Well, almost seventeen, but who gave a fuck. Christmas holidays of sixth year. At least he wouldn't have to take O.W.L.s again. At least he wouldn't have to suffer more teenaged years than strictly necessary. Never mind that he didn't understand why any of them were necessary in the first place—surely his life would be more useful to live over when he was already a Death Eater. He honestly couldn't see why he'd been thrust into the past at such a bizarre midway point, more than nine months past his rupture with Lily, and a good ten before he was Marked. Why _now_?

After living for a good thirty-eight dismal years, Severus had honed innate pessimism to a cast-iron ideology. There might be a good reason for it, but there also might not be any reason at all.

The only thing he was certain of was how much he didn't want to be in this fucking house. He rooted through a pile of clothes on the floor for his only coat, a miserable thing from the resale shop in town, and left, avoiding both his parents, silent somewhere in the shallow depths of the house.

Christmas was barely two days away, bringing the New Year closer with each barely perceptibly lighter day. It was full dark now, though, gone five in the evening, and in that decade there were still plenty of people living in his end of town. Although the streetlights were erratic, enough windows were lit in the houses he passed, shoved up against the street as they were with scarcely any yard, to patch the sidewalk with light. Severus moved through bands of darkness and sickly electric light, letting the strains of television and radio programs, arguments and conversations, doors banging and vacuum cleaners running, wash past; the detritus of Muggle life. He passed a cinema, one that he remembered as being closed for a while, back in the time when he'd grown up and outlived everyone. Tonight, the front of the building was plastered with posters of something called Star Wars, with May 25 printed beneath it. He thought it sounded vaguely familiar.

He realized he wasn't really thinking about anything, and liked it that way, at least for a moment. As he turned onto a commercial avenue, past closing storefronts, he knew without looking into his reflection on dusty window fronts what anyone would see: an adolescent, rather ugly, in ill-fitting second-hand clothes, who ought to wash his hair and fix his teeth and, if he could manage it, turn into an entirely different person if he wanted to get on with decent people. Not so different than who he'd been the moment he died—than who he was, still—and yet . . . that's all he was, to anyone. There were no Dark Marks, just the too-short hems of his trousers. There was no double-crossing Death Eater, just an ugly boy. To these Muggles, he wasn't even Severus Snape. He was just . . . no one.

And for the moment, that was really all right.

A relief.

He drifted about the streets of town until he came to a sort of greasy spoon, its stark lights glaring feebly through drawn blinds, an _open_ sign flickering a belligerent red over its door. He went in. It was empty except for the waitress, who was smoking, and a tired-looking woman reading a newspaper in a booth in the corner.

The waitress drifted over, her fag dangling between her fingers, the end burning a ring of molten orange in a circle of black. Severus rarely smelled that odor; only once or twice a year, when he stocked up at the shops during summers and someone who'd just bought a carton would park themselves just outside the entrance and light up.

"What'll you have?" the waitress asked. Her voice was gravelly. Severus didn't realize he'd been staring at her hands, which were broad and square-looking, with an ugly manicure, until she lifted the fag to her mouth and gave him a mocking look.

"It doesn't matter," he said. His own voice was flat, because it really didn't matter. "Anything."

"You ask for anything, you'll get anything," she said. It was neither hostile nor a warning; just a statement.

"Then that's what I'll get."

"Then that's what you'll get," she agreed, and left him.

Severus fiddled with the blinds until he could see out into the street. Cars went by. People walked. A light drizzle had begun to fall, making the streets shimmer with reflections from the shops and traffic and the erratic light that Muggles used to cut up the night. Everything looked cold.

The waitress came back with a pot of coffee and unremarkable china, and poured him a cup without a word. There was something about her hands that made him stare. When he realized that they were a man's hands, he felt like a voyeur.

She was smirking at him. He drank the coffee without comment, and she went away again, to sit near the bar and light another cigarette. Behind her, the kitchen clattered. The woman reading the newspaper in the corner was crying silently, either reading or pretending to read while she cried.

 _Christ God, this place is depressing._ It was so depressing he almost started laughing, just at the sheer absurdity.

The sight of the woman crying over her paper made him wish he'd brought something to read. Without a book, he didn't have anything to occupy himself, and would inevitably lapse again to brooding over his . . . present. Future?

Of course, that was supposing this was even happening. Everything was realistic, even accurate insofar as sensory details were concerned; but was it real? He'd never heard of people who returned to a random moment in time after dying. What was this supposed to be, some kind of time feedback loop?

Maybe it was a chance to ditch everyone and move to Belize. Or Crete. He had always cherished a soft spot for the Mediterranean. Perhaps this was what the afterlife was all about: initial confusion, because there was no After Death manual; and then turning a profit. . . a chance to do what you didn't get to, in life.

The door banged open. He turned out of reflex to see who'd come in so noisily—

And almost choked on his heart, because it was Lily.

Lily, whom he'd only seen for the past seventeen years in Pensieve memories, and who, seen like that, he might as well not have been seeing at all. Dumbledore probably would have said something revolting about the magic of the heart being different from the magic of the wand, but Severus just thought the human brain was feeble. He'd forgotten about the freckles on the bridge of her nose—as he saw them, he remembered how she'd hated them, how suntan lotion never did any good; she always got them, no matter what. He'd forgotten how her right eyebrow winged up at the corner, which had driven her mad, because, she'd always declared, they were supposed to be _symmetrical_. Potter's—the boy's; Harry's—eyebrows had been exactly the same.

He'd forgotten how well she glared.

But he hadn't forgotten her tracking him down in a Muggle greasy spoon just after Christmas, because it had never happened. This was . . . new.

He realized the waitress had come up next to his table and was eyeing Lily with boredly raised eyebrows. If Lily saw her, she ignored her, but Severus suspected that Lily was too preoccupied with glaring bloody murder at him. She'd always been single-minded in a temper.

"Severus," she said, with her teeth so tightly ground together his name came out as a Parseltongue-like hiss. For a moment, Severus wondered what was so horrific about his sitting in a Muggle diner, but then adult reasoning asserted itself: Lily was clearly enraged about something else.

He just waited, watching her in silence. He honestly didn't know what to say. Whenever he'd imagined begging Lily for forgiveness, it was always her ghost, the woman, the mother of the boy, and she'd always _known_ everything he'd done. This Lily didn't know anything.

Lily glared, opened her mouth, then shut it tight and looked even more furious, although this time with herself.

"Have a seat, hon," the waitress said finally. From the way Lily jumped, Severus knew she really hadn't noticed anyone else was there.

"Er—thank you," Lily muttered, going a bright red that clashed with her hair. She edged around the booth to the other side and sat awkwardly across from Severus, tilting to the side as she tried to scoot down the horrible Muggle plastic.

"You having anything?" the waitress asked her, bored still. "Other than a fight."

"Oh—er." Thrown off her game, Lily blinked. Severus had the bizarre sensation of being reminded, once again, of Potter—the son, not the father. It was perhaps the most backwards thing he'd ever felt. For six years, he'd done nothing but think of Lily when he looked at the boy—how little he resembled her, how he was nothing like her, except for the eyes; the eyes that always looked at Severus just the way she'd done during the worst years of his life—and now he was face-to-face with Lily and the sheepish look on her face was _exactly like the boy's_.

"Um . . . coffee?" she offered, like she was asking if it was permitted.

The waitress went to get the pot without a word. Once she was gone, Lily's embarrassment started to shift back into a scowl. Severus found himself looking at his hands. He couldn't remember how he'd cut his knuckle. He didn't say anything, and neither did she.

The waitress came back with Lily's coffee and Severus' food, which was basically breakfast, and rather runny. He didn't particularly care. Except for the few years between Lily's d—between what had happened in '81 and the descent of her unruly son upon the school, he'd never cared about what he ate. It wasn't until he didn't have anything occupying his existence except the mundanity of a teacher's life—and a healthy rivalry with Minerva, which frequently degenerated into their both spitting like cats—that he'd been . . . relaxed . . . enough to develop an appreciation for food.

"Would you like any?" he asked Lily in the emptied voice he used when he was Occluding his hardest.

Lily, who'd been smiling thank-you at the waitress, blinked. "What?" she blurted.

He gestured silently at the food.

"Oh—no. I ate. Petunia cooked, as unbelievable as it sounds—I'd forgotten how she—" Lily shut her mouth, like she realized they were having a civilized conversation; as if one of them weren't a Death Eater who'd called his once-best friend a Mudblood, and the other . . .

"All right," he said indifferently, took a fork and started cutting up his eggs. For a few seconds there was only the scrape of the fork tines against ceramic. The waitress had gone.

"Severus," Lily said in an ominous voice. He looked up from his eggs, his walls as solid as stone, and felt a fissure as wide as the Nile crack through them at the look on Lily's face. At seventeen he would never have been able to figure it out, and at thirty-eight he was still unsure, because there was such a strange complexity of emotion there. Even Leglimency couldn't explain the mixture of rage, loathing, and . . . something that looked like grief.

"I want to know why," she said. She hadn't touched her coffee. It was too lukewarm even for steam. "I came here to ask you why—"

Severus drank coffee and waited. Her hair was damp and curling up on the ends from the moisture, and she hadn't come in carrying an umbrella. His heart was beating so loudly he felt dizzy. He wondered if she could hear the slamming thuds.

"Okay, I want to know a lot of things," she said, "but first of all I want to know why you called me— _that_."

He set down his cup very deliberately, trying to ground himself in the feeling of the thing in his hand. He'd had this conversation with her a hundred thousand different ways in the sanctity of his mind, but now he couldn't remember a single thing he'd said, a single explanation he'd offered her.

"I could explain it to you," he said, as deliberately as he'd put down his cup, "but you wouldn't understand."

"If you're going to be patronizing _now_ of all times—"

"Or maybe you would," he went on quietly. "What was it you said before you left? 'I'd wash my pants if I were you, Snivellus.' Something like that, I believe."

Lily went pale, but two spots of color stood out on her face. "You—" Then she looked honestly confused. "You . . . what?"

"You were hurt. You found the most hurtful thing you could say, and said it. Retaliation." He picked up his fork and stirred it through his eggs, watching the yolks stain the egg white.

She was silent. "You expect me to believe that's it," she said. He couldn't read her tone.

"I don't expect you to believe anything. I'm not in charge of what you believe or not. You asked, and I told. The rest is yours."

He kept his tone devoid of all emotion; Occluded. Inside, he felt sick, twisted up, as if all his organs were being wrung like a wet rag. All the forgiveness he'd begged, all the arguments that brought in every degrading aspect of his past, pleading with her to understand, and now he simply threw it back at her that she'd said _that_? He didn't quite understand himself. It must be the Occlumency: it made everything seem removed, unimportant—emotions like valves, shut off.

"And where does that stand," she asked flatly, "with all the—the—" Her voice dropped to a hiss that sounded half-frightened, half-furious. " _The bloody Death Eater stuff_?"

"Death Eaters say things like that all the time," he said, still emptied and shut-off. "So does any stuck-up pure-blood. Or anyone who . . . "

"Anyone who _what_ , Severus?" She was glaring, the color still high in her face.

"Anyone who wishes they were a stuck-up pure-blood or wants to be a Death Eater," he finished, his emptiest yet.

"And which are _you_?"

Oh Christ, she was going to cry. She was glaring like she wanted to curse the nose off his face, but she was about to cry. It made him want to die all over again, because dying was really painless—it was living that was the trouble. So in the end, he was honest.

"I don't know what I am."

Lily stared at him. Then she snorted, and a sneer curled her lip in a way that was positively ugly. "Well, at least you're telling me the truth."

In a split second, a rage overwhelmed him, so massive he didn't know how he kept from flinging his plate across the room, from shattering all the windows with one swipe of his wand. _I lied_ , he wanted to scream, _I lied to protect your son for seventeen years, for nothing, for fucking nothing—_

His vision had whited out with fury. When he came back to himself a moment later—it had only been seconds, and then he'd regained control—he saw Lily was staring at him with a white, frightened look on her face.

He opened his mouth to say something—to reassure her, perhaps, or in hopes of finding one of the many things he'd said to her ghost in the past seventeen years—but what came out, in a whisper, was: "Shouldn't think you can patronize me anymore, should you?"

Lily pushed herself up from the booth slowly. She was shaking. He couldn't move. He was ice, stone.

Then she turned and ran. The door slammed open, rattling the bell, and then thwumped shut.

Severus sat for an eternal moment longer, staring at her untouched coffee. Then he ripped all the remaining money out of his wallet, threw it to the side of his plate, and ran after her.


	2. Chapter 2

Icy rain hit her in the face, but Lily was thankful, because it gave her something to think about other than what had just happened. Reflex made her duck her head anyway, except that made the rain spatter onto her scalp. She groped for the collar of her jacket, trying to pull it up over her head and at the same time keep propelling herself forward, because if Sev—if _Snape_ —came after her she didn't know what she'd do—scream and hex him silly maybe, or cry, and she didn't want to do either, even if it was to bloody Severus bloody Snape—

"Oof!" She heard the grunt at the same moment she realized she'd just barreled into someone.

"Sorry," she gasped, trying to shove past, but she found her upper arm seized. For a wild moment she wondered if it was Sev—Snape! Sodding hell! The bloody boy hadn't even apologized for calling her a Mudblood or looking to be a Death Eater, and she couldn't—

"Where you goin', luv?" slurred a beery breath in her face.

Oh, for the love of Merlin. And now she was being accosted by a group of drunks. How would the restriction for underage wizardry prosecute if she explained she'd hexed the balls off several drunk Muggles only because they'd tried to grope her on the street?

"I'm going _away_ , thank you," she snapped, pulling on her arm. The drunk just grinned and teetered toward her, which made his friends giggle like drunken perverts.

Lily kneed him in the fork, and he went down. She started to push past him, but one of his friends grabbed her from behind.

"Let go!" she shouted, trying to elbow him in the stomach.

"Oh, no," his voice sloshed in his ear, "I'mma get me some nice cherry—"

There was a kind of crunch, and his arms dropped away, his body slumping to the pavement with a sound like a bag of wet cement dropping. Lily whirled around—

Of course, it was Severus—with, of all things, a crowbar in one hand. It extended from his fist, black and menacing, the lights from the storefronts around them shimmering in the rain drops that sluiced off the metal. His face was stark white, and his eyes glittered in a way that made some of her more important organs, like her heart, vanish as if someone had wordlessly Summoned them away.

She heard erratic footsteps pattering away. Blinking, she looked around to find that it was just her and Sev and the two fallen drunks—and a bunch of spectators, who'd realized something interesting was happening and had slowed in the rain to whisper and point.

Severus stepped over the man he'd hit—with a _crowbar_ —and stopped in front of the one she'd taken down. He was groaning, trying to push himself up. Severus hooked the crowbar's claw under his chin and tipped his face up. The man was cross-eyed. Lily had an odd urge to laugh and then throw up. Or maybe throw up and then laugh.

"What do you think your punishment should be?" Severus asked him, his voice low and menacing and silky soft, even more so than it had been in the diner, before she had run. She had never known Severus possessed that voice. When she'd known him in school, he'd still been trying to squash the Northern burr out of his voice, but this was slick and perfect and terrifying. "You don't think you've earned enough, do you?"

"Sev—" She grabbed his arm and tugged, even as a part of her screamed, _What are you doing, why are you touching him—_ "Sev, there's Muggles all round us—we can't get picked up by the cops, we'll get—expelled—"

Severus wouldn't look away from the man on the ground. "I haven't used magic. This is a legitimate Muggle defensive-style weapon."

"For thugs!" A man was starting across the street toward them. "Oh God—" She scrambled inside her jacket for her wand, trying to hide what she was doing, but the man saw, and he shouted, "Any weapons you have, drop them! I mean it!" Lily checked desperately to see if he was a cop, but she didn't see a uniform—of course, he could be in plain clothes—

Severus turned as if he'd been charmed and dropped the crowbar with a metallic clatter. "Of course," he said, suddenly and utterly calm.

The man stared at him for a moment, and then he said, "All right then, just so that's clear. Run along now." Then, while Lily—and everyone else—stood in stupefaction, he turned to the crowds and said, "All of you, run along, nothing to see—just a little misunderstanding—"

Lily's feet understood that Severus was trying to make her walk and trotted her along beside him, past the crowds that parted with ominous (and confused) muttering. Lily didn't dare speak. She didn't dare look up at Severus, or pull away from him, even though her skin was crawling. He was just touching her elbow through her shearling jacket, but her skin felt like it was trying to writhe away from him. She kept hearing the crunch of the man's skull, the sound of that low, nasty, alluring voice—and now she was wondering if the glistening drops on the crowbar had been just rain—

They reached the end of the street and turned off it mechanically. Lily glanced over her shoulder, but Severus said in a cold, curt voice, "We're not being followed."

"You used a Confundus on that man," she stated.

"Of course I did."

"You hit that man in the head with the crowbar."

"Observant, aren't you." A part of Lily wanted to shrink, and another part wanted to slap him, and a third was confused. Severus had never spoken to her like that. He'd never had that creepy command over his voice, either—or looked like he'd done in the diner, like he was hanging onto sanity by a thread—

He must be a Death Eater already, and it must have changed him—

Lily was surprised by how much the realization made her want to weep. She'd thought she'd be able to stop it—that this time, she'd be able to change things, and then everything wouldn't go so horribly wrong—that somehow, if she could undo the damage from that day when he'd called her a Mudblood and she'd refused to forgive him, she'd be able to stop Voldemort from growing stronger and the Marauders splitting apart, and James dying, and Harry—

_But I'm too late, I'm too late—they took him from me again, already, they've got him—_

She had to get away. She had to—she couldn't be here with Severus, who'd already gone over to the Dark Lord, who'd already been taken, who'd let her best friend be erased, whom she'd never get back again. Somehow the failure was more bitter the second time.

She shoved Severus, only realizing when he staggered and knocked into a metal trashcan that he hadn't been holding her arm anymore—but she took off anyway. She sprinted, ignoring his shout, the frozen rain knifing into her face, the way her feet slithered on the slick pavement. She veered around a car passing up the street, leapt over a bench, and pounded through the play park, over the sodden grass, past the creaking, rusted metal of the swings that swung empty in the starless December night. If she tried, maybe she could forget who she was and what she was doing—could forget that she had watched her husband die, that she'd begged a monster for the life of her child, knowing it was no good, but unable to stop herself, certain to her very core that whatever he'd asked her to do in exchange for Harry's life, she'd have done it—she'd have died in a heartbeat—and she had . . . she had . . .

And what a strange kind of afterlife this was, waking up in her bedroom in her parents' tidy suburban home, realizing she was a teenager again, back before a time when she'd ever married James Potter and had a son and defied a Dark Lord and _died_ —

Except that she had, and she knew it. It was everyone else who didn't have any idea.

The cold night air was burning in her lungs, scorching her mouth and throat as she panted. She was almost to her street; there were the stairs that led down from the play park to her road. Maybe she should pass them up, keep running, until she was so exhausted she forgot everything, even her own name . . .

. . . but even if she forgot Lily, would she forget Harry?

Her foot slipped on a patch of ice that had already frozen at the top of the stairs. With a pulse of annoyance she noticed she was falling. She grabbed for the handrail, but it was slippery with rain, and her hand slid right off. With surprise she realized she was about to fall headfirst down the stairs.

_Well, that's a funny way to go twice in one day—_

Someone grabbed her by the back of her coat and yanked, and she went staggering back into their arms. She smelled musty old mothballs and cooked cabbage, two scents that she'd always associated with Severus, that he'd always hated, because they pervaded his house and clung to him during hols no matter what he did.

Severus shoved her onto her feet and spun her around. She blinked up at him, wondering when he'd gotten so tall, because at the end of fifth year he'd still been just her height. She realized he was half-shouting at her:

" . . . think you're doing, running flat-out in the dark, with everything half fucking frozen! You could've broken your neck, you could've . . . "

She stood mutely, letting him rant at her. His accent was fluctuating in and out of his voice, particularly when he swore.

She let him run himself out. At least, that was the plan, but after a few minutes she wondered if that were possible—he seemed to be on a roll. Had he spent the last half a year building up steam? She tried to listen to his exact words, but as usual when Severus worked himself into a temper, he was virtually incoherent. All she could understand was that he apparently thought she was a reckless bloody Gryffindor and before she went and got herself killed, she ought to think for five seconds if there was a way she could do something so simple as not die.

"Like _walking_ down the stairs?" she interrupted.

Severus clamped off his voice like her words had shut off a valve. For a split second, his face was wild again, almost deranged. A thought echoed inside her mind, as if her head were a dark, empty cave:

_What happened to Severus to make him like this?_

She wanted to take his hand. She wanted to scream at him. She wanted to beg him to leave Voldemort, to come with her, to save Harry, to keep her from going mad, because her baby should be in her arms and he wasn't; a madman had come and murdered her husband and she'd seen green light and then here she was.

"I'm not suicidal," she said to Severus, wondering where that rational-sounding voice came from. Inside, she felt as mad as he'd looked twice tonight. Who had Severus lost?

"Well then." He was breathing fast. "Walking down the stairs would be a good fucking start."

"I'll try that. Here." She turned and managed to avoid the icy patch as she began navigating down the concrete stairs. "Watch me and make sure I don't die."

She hadn't been serious. But when she looked up the flight of steps and saw Severus standing at the top, the cold, white-green streetlight turning his face into planes of light and shadow, she knew that he was as serious as death itself.

"As long as I live, I will keep you alive."

Lily blinked. He suddenly withdrew, pulling back into the shadows outside of the streetlamp's glow.

"Go home," he snapped. She pictured him drawing his coat around him, tucking himself inside, like a turtle into its shell. "Before you freeze to death. I can't control the bloody weather."

"Right," Lily said slowly. She walked down the street toward her house, aware of every press of her foot against the pavement, the sound of her breath over her lips, the crunch and hiss of bushes moving in the wind. At the foot of her sidewalk she stopped and glanced back the way she'd come, and sure enough, Severus stood at the bottom of the fateful staircase, watching her.

She went up to the side of the house, seized the ivy, and began the climb up to her bedroom window.

* * *

 

Severus stood for a long while after Lily had vanished into her own hedges, watching the spot where she'd stood. In part he stood there because Lily had simply walked off like it was normal—not like she was breaking with him forever, or vanishing somewhere he couldn't follow—just like they had spent the evening together, doing something dull and regular, and it was time for her to be home. How many sodding times had he stood at the foot of these stairs, watching her walk down to her house, pause at the foot of the drive—like she'd just done—and wave (like she hadn't)? Too many past counting. But each one had been precious. He couldn't remember them all, but he knew they were somewhere inside his memories, all the same.

He'd never gone down to her house much because her parents hadn't liked him. He didn't think they'd be thrilled to know their daughter had been running around town with him after—shit, what time was it, anyway?

The impulse to check his wrist for a watch because it enraged his mother when he was out late made him realize how very real this all felt. It wasn't just that his fingertips and nose felt frozen, or that he was still hungry, or the rough polyester material from his trousers rubbing a raw spot on the inside of his thighs; it was the psychological bits, too. He remembered how his mother had told him, when he was fourteen, that if he missed curfew, he could sleep in the garden. Even the freckles on Lily's _nose_ were accurate.

The static details were realistic, and yet events were mutable. He didn't remember coming back here for any holiday. He knew he'd never met Lily like this, whether in a diner or on a desert island. After That Day, they'd never spoken.

They had certainly never faced off across a formica-topped table, throwing the past into each other's faces. He'd never hospitalized a would-be rapist on a Muggle street, and Lily had never, as far as he knew, kneed another so hard that he'd probably wished he'd gotten Severus' crowbar instead . . . what with rounding off the evening by saving her from breaking her neck and then ranting at her for God only knew how long, he could safely say he had a failure so massive he wasn't sure it might not actually be a resounding success.

At what, he couldn't tell. Failure, probably.

Well, in any event, he couldn't go home; his mother warded the house after seven, and the hour had to be far advanced by now. He didn't _want_ to go home. Why in all the flaming hells had he trundled back to this arse-end of misery for Christmas? He ransacked his memories, but he still drew a blank. There must have been some very strong reason, because in general, if someone had given him the option of cutting off a toe or willingly returning home, he'd have chosen toes until he ran out and then offered up ten fingers.

He wiggled his toes in his shitty boots. The sole on the right was coming untacked, but all ten toes seemed to be in evidence. So, what then? Perhaps it was due to the Different-ness. . . or was the gap in his memory evidence that this wasn't real? It had been years since he'd been allowed the luxury of forgetting even the most insignificant rubbish. It wasn't like him to forget.

It wasn't like Lily to speak to him willingly, even if hostility was her only motivator.

He wandered back toward the town centre, thinking he should get out of the play park or risk looking like a pervert. He reminded himself that he was nearly-seventeen, not thirty-eight, so loitering in a play park after dark would only look like a pathetic act of deviance. Still, he didn't want the police coming up with suspicious eyes to turf him out, so he skirted the park, with its eerily creaking swings and iced-over see-saw, and the street light that cast a stark, sickly glow across the landscape.

He decided to wander some more, in his pathetic coat and coming-apart boots. Most people seemed cheerful, God damn them. He heard the strains of choir music and looked across the street at a church, buttery golden light shining from its windows. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in a church, if he ever really had. He seemed to have a blurred memory of an altar and candles, but he could've just seen it on the telly as a child during one of his father's programmes. His father hadn't been the religious sort of Muggle, and wizards and witches never were; it was too hard to get enthusiastic about a religion that said you should be burned at the stake. They celebrated Christmas, not the solstice, but it was really a habit of fitting in, from centuries of living thick among Muggles. The most Severus had ever been exposed to Christmas had been as a child during primary school, where they were expected to do stupid things like make red and green decorations out of glue and scratchy paper.

The memory of his bedroom calendar appeared in his mind. It was December 23rd today, unless he was mistaken, and he didn't do mistakes any more than he did memory loss. At least, he'd thought so.

Wait. He pictured the bedroom calendar again. He'd circled a day . . . which one? December 31st. Nothing written there, just a circle, in thick black ink. Why the 31st? He wouldn't have circled it for no good reason. Was that why he'd come home? It was driving him mad that he couldn't remember!

He kicked a trashcan in frustration, knocking it rolling into the gutter, the trash expelling like the guts of a thing eviscerated.

"Hey now," protested an old man, and got a glare that made him shrink into his coat, which was much nicer than Severus'.

"Shelter's over there, young man," the old wife said, pointing across the street; and then, "Come on, Arthur, let's get out of this wet . . . "

Shelter? Severus looked where she had indicated. She'd pointed at the church. Churches, he recalled, were frequently associated with charities . . .

Like homeless shelters.

He considered it for a moment, and then decided it was a decent idea. He needed a place to sleep, and he had no money. Were he of-age, he could have Confunded his way into a hotel, but it would be risky to do magic twice in one evening in a major Muggle area. A shelter, however, was something he could talk his way into; and if Severus had successfully fooled a Dark Lord during two separate wars, a scrawny boy in obviously second-hand clothes should be able to finagle his way into a homeless shelter.

He hoped they had something to eat, because Lily had interrupted his eggs.

For a moment, he entertained the thought of going into the church and doing something vaguely religious, like lighting a candle and offering up a prayer to whoever had sent him to this shitty, miserable, hopeless place, where Lily still lived.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The concept of Lily climbing the ivy to get to her window is not mine; I believe it wouldn't get out of my head after reading a similar move by Severus in kellydofc's "The Road Not Taken." I considered it pretty sensible - I mean, with Petunia on the watch, as you know she'd be, the front door would be right out. . .


	3. Chapter 3

Lily hid her damp coat in her closet and shoved her muddy shoes under her bed. There was nothing to do about her hair, which was curling up the way it always did in the damp, but hopefully the space heater would take care of that, should anyone come check on her.

After changing into her pajamas, she sat down at her desk, pulled out a piece of notebook paper and a green pen—everyone always gave her green gifts, even though her favorite color was blue—and started to write out what she knew.

This was a habit she'd picked up from Severus, and she'd always kept it, even when they weren't friends anymore; when she was so angry with him, and so hurt, she could barely breathe. In fact, it had helped particularly then, as it had when she'd become pregnant and the thought of becoming a mother had terrified her; and especially after Harry was born.

The thing that hardly anyone understood about Severus (well, one of the things) was that he was an intensely emotional person. His emotions didn't seem to have middle settings. He was either overjoyed or dejected, filled with loathing or awe, enraged or blissful. He'd never been a . . . _calm_ person. And when he became upset, he got _so_ upset he had trouble thinking straight, even speaking. That disjointed rant tonight had been pure Severus.

Once, when he'd become incoherent with rage and helplessness—they'd been about eleven—Lily had timidly asked him to write it out for her, because she couldn't understand him. What he'd written hadn't been much more intelligible, but after that he had started writing things out more and more, so that he could better work himself into a state of calm and clarity. And then Lily had started doing it too, until it became as natural as brushing her hair in the morning.

So she put the green pen to paper and wrote:

_What's happened?_

_-Voldemort came to my house, murdered my husband, and then . . . stood there and . . . told me to step aside?_

That was . . . bizarre, to say the least. She hadn't remembered that until her pen hit the paper. She'd just remembered pleading, begging, sobbing her heart out, listening to Harry screaming in her ear, feeling his warm, fragile body pressed to the beat of her heart—

The next letters were somewhat shaky-looking.

- _There was green light, so I must've died, and then woke up here. Here, December 23rd, 1976, in my parents' house . . . well, just my mum's, now . . ._

It was lucky she'd had five years, now, to adjust to the death of her father. Except here, it would have happened only a few months ago, during the summer . . . summer of 1976. That was one blessing, at least: she didn't have to relive that loss.

_-The secret we entrusted to Peter must have been found out somehow. Someone must have taken him, and got the information out of him . . . all it would take was Imperius . . ._

Perhaps the Death Eaters had kidnapped Sirius and discovered he wasn't the Secret Keeper . . . perhaps then they'd gone to Remus, and finally to Peter . . . they could all be dead, the way James was, she was, Harry—

She stopped, trying to breathe.

She forced her eyes down to her list. She didn't know very much at all, did she? And everything she did know didn't help. At all.

Why had she come back here? Was this what happened when everyone died? Did they get shunted back to some point in their past, as a kind of living purgatory? Was this all made-up, happening in her soul; all that was left of her after dying?

Well, she certainly didn't know either way. She couldn't see any reason why she should be sent back here, to this random point in time, to run around town and accost ex-best friends who had become Death Eaters and almost torn out her heart. She couldn't watch that happen again. If she had to—maybe this was hell—

Severus . . .

She took out another sheet of paper and wrote, _What do I know about Sev?_

_-For years he was keen to join the Death Eaters._

_-He called me a mudblood in . . . well, now it's just last May, God._

_-He's always hanging around with loads of Death Eater wannabes, what are their names... Rosier, Wilkes, Avery, Mulciber, Lestrange..._

_-He was livid when I almost tripped on the stairs and broke my neck._

_-He saved me twice tonight._

And once, almost two years ago, her timeline.

Lily _knew_ Severus had been a Death Eater, although she was the only one who had, and with good reason. They all wore masks, and Voldemort was clever; they didn't all know each other, in case any of them was captured, because then the information couldn't be tortured or bartered out of them. They'd die or go to prison only giving up a few names, like a handful of grass pulled out of a field . . .

But of all the Death Eaters the Order and the Aurors had captured, none of them had ever given Severus' name. Every time the list had been read out of Death Eaters they knew—and it was always despairingly small—Lily had waited in sick dread to hear _Severus Snape_ and always wanted to weep with relief when she never did.

Then, just after she'd married James, there'd been a fight—a battle. Parson's Hill. The second time she and James had stared Voldemort in the face and gotten away. It hadn't been just the two of them—Remus had been there, too, and Marlene, and a few others—Death Eaters everywhere, in their black robes and the masks that would've looked stupid if there hadn't been psychopaths behind them, trying to kill her and all her friends. Lily had been firing curses, slamming up shields, her whole mind strung out like a wire, every impression grotesquely distorted, flashing past at light-speed; and then something had hit her in the back, something like fire made ice, or pain into plasma, and then a sucking sensation, like the world flashing to blackness, and all the sound had been sucked out of her ears.

She'd come awake lying on cold grass, hearing the snap of fire in the distance, the rush of the wind, and felt the blinding pain receding. Someone was touching her, fluttering movements, like they were afraid to press too hard—and they had the right idea, because one touch too firm and she screamed weakly, trying to roll away—

Then a voice, a rushing whisper, "No, lie still, I can stop it, if you'll just lie still—"

So she did, because a Death Eater wasn't likely to be murmuring something soft to her, like a lullaby. Gradually the pain faded, as if with each low, slightly off-key note, her agony was a song winding down to its finish. She opened her eyes and saw the hands first, the long-fingered hands with the cracked, stained nails, the scar like a starburst in the space where the thumb joined the hand—she'd stared up into one of those stupid, terrifying masks, and seen black eyes glittering out of the slits—

And then he was gone, literally: Apparating away, as if disappearing into a black hole. She got up from the cold ground, wincing but able to move, and Apparated back to her cottage, where she found Sirius frantic because James was. When she came through the door, Sirius actually crushed her in a hug, shocking her because she'd always secretly thought Sirius couldn't stand her.

She had never told James about Severus, because telling James would mean telling Sirius, would mean telling the whole world. She had thought about going to Dumbledore, asking him to protect Severus . . . but she wasn't sure that Dumbledore wouldn't use the information to hunt Severus down and throw him in prison, or play him off as a spy . . . and being taken down in battle by the Order had to be a kinder fate than a traitor's discovery in Voldemort's camp.

That night had taught her two things she'd never been able to forget: that Severus was most certainly, very much, totally and really a Death Eater, and that he'd saved her life. He'd healed her. The moment she looked at him, he'd left her.

She drew a little snake on his list with her pen, only half paying attention. She could understand if _that_ Severus were acting like _this_ Severus had done tonight—a Severus who'd watched people be tortured and killed, who'd been in mortal combat, and who'd done something so dangerous as save the Mudblood enemy during battle . . . well . . . he would be bound to hang onto sanity by the skin of his teeth. Since that night, especially on nights when she couldn't sleep, she had wondered if he was still alive, or if he'd been . . . punished . . . for helping her, if someone had seen. She had written a hundred thousand letters, some furious and accusatory, some crinkled with tears, some begging him to see her, even one that was simply, _I'm going to be a mum and I'm so scared._ She'd held that one for a good ten minutes before throwing it into the fire. It was the first time she had removed those words from the clutter of her mind, half-poised to tell someone else. It would figure her first impulse was to tell her current-Death Eater ex-best friend.

Because she couldn't tell Sev, she'd told Remus. He had just looked at her for a long moment, and then hugged her and said, "You're going to be a wonderful mum." Which was honestly better than what Severus would've said, which probably would have been along the lines of, "Are you stupid, getting pregnant in the middle of a war you're _fighting in_? Didn't your mum teach you anything, Lily?"

She'd caught herself doing that constantly, after they'd fallen out. For weeks after The Incident she kept expecting to realize it was just a dream, or that Slughorn had them testing Befuddlement Draughts and Sev's had been so good, she'd forgotten the way things really were. But things were the way they ought not to be, and her mind liked to forget. When she managed to stop calling everyone around her 'Sev,' it was only because she started having daily conversations with him in her own head. She certainly never told anyone about that, because they'd thought she was mad enough to hang around Sev when their friendship was real. If they knew she was keeping up an imaginary friendship with him, they'd probably have her committed.

It was just that she'd missed Sev so much. She missed him in a way that she now missed James and Harry. It was as if her left arm had been removed. When Severus had said "Mudblood" to her and she realized what it meant—for them, for him; that he was gone, one of _them_ —she'd amputated him from her life, and it had been as painful a decision as cutting off a gangrenous limb to save her body. The way everyone had _congratulated_ her for weeks afterward had driven her into a state of near-constant rage. How dare they congratulate her when her heart was bleeding out? How dare they feel triumph when all she felt, could possibly feel, was despair, because nothing would be right in her world ever again, now that Severus was going to be a Death Eater? Those cruel, vicious monsters would take her best friend, the boy who'd been the first ever to make her feel like she would belong anywhere, and they'd destroy him. They'd already pushed him to the first step: putting that word Mudblood in his head, filling him with ideas that hurting people wasn't evil and cruel, or maybe that it was okay to be evil and cruel if it was Mudbloods you were doing it to. Piece by piece they had taken away the Sev who'd emerged excited from the bushes and whispered, "I know what you are"; the Sev who'd eaten so many cream-filled chocolates on their first Honeydukes weekend that he'd been sick everywhere; the Sev who'd once told her she was going to be the most brilliant witch ever and rule the entire world. They had taken him away and replaced him with a Death Eater.

Lily realized she was shaking. She put down the pen and rubbed her hands together, trying to calm herself, and could barely feel her fingers, she was so cold.

Until tonight, she hadn't seen Sev since that night he'd saved her wearing his Death Eater mask. Even when she'd written her letters to him and pulled out, from the secret panel in her dresser, the pictures she'd kept of them as children, she'd never felt the pain and confusion and grief this . . . immediately. Now she had seen him again, for the first time in two years, and she felt shaky and distraught. Was it because the shock was mixed up with losing James and Harry? Or was it because she had never gotten over this, and seeing Sev again reminded her that she never had?

A tap on her door. She quickly covered her notes with a blank sheet of paper—not that anyone in her house would understand what it meant, but it was too private even for ignorant eyes—and wiped at her face. "Come in," she called, trying to sound cheerful, not thick and miserable.

"Lily?" It was Mum. Lily was glad the only lamp lit in the room was behind her, so her mum couldn't see her eyes fill with tears again at the sight of Mum appearing at the door in her old, favorite bath robe, the one the color of the sea on a cloudy day.

"It's late, sweetheart. Since we're going to see Gran tomorrow, you should get to bed."

"Right, Mum," Lily managed.

Mum was silent for a moment, and then she came closer, her voice gaining an abruptness. "Sweetheart, are you crying?"

"Oh, I'm just being stupid," Lily said, although she knew she'd never cried about anything less stupid in her entire life. "It's just—a boy, that's all."

She let Mum wrap her arms around her shoulders, and pressed her cheek against her mum's satiny dressing-gown. She'd forgotten the way Mum had always smelled of gardenias and oranges.

The despair of everything yawned inside her. How much she wished to tell Mum about it; Mum, whom she'd lost two years ago, who'd never got to meet Harry, who'd been gone before she knew she was even going to be a grandmother.

But Mum wouldn't understand. How could she? Even with a witch for a daughter, she couldn't understand magic, not really, the way Lily wouldn't be able to understand what it was like to live in Egypt or Nepal. Her mum might understand the despair of losing her child . . . but Lily wasn't sure she'd have been able to speak of it, even had she known how to explain things.

"I was just thinking." She smiled, feeling her mum's fingers in her hair. "If I have a son, I'm naming him Harry. Harry James."

Her mother's fingers suddenly tightened on her like claws. Before Lily could even be fully confused, her mother pushed her back in her desk chair to see her face. Her own looked as white as Severus' had out on the street.

"You're pregnant?" she whispered.

"What?" Lily gaped at her. "Why the hell would you—oh." She repeated what she'd said to herself, and went bright red. "Oh God—I'm so sorry, Mum, that wasn't what I meant at _all_." Her mother still looked horrified, so Lily took her hand and said as seriously, as sincerely as she could, "Mum, I swear on all that's holy that the only way I could be pregnant is if I were the Immaculate Conception."

Mum's eyes roved over her face, and then she shut her eyes as her whole body relaxed. "You're certainly not, if you swear like that." Then she pulled herself straighter, saying in a stronger voice, "Good Lord, Lily, the fright you gave me. Telling me you were crying over a boy, and then saying—Lord." She pressed her hand over her heart. "Don't frighten me like that, I beg you. My heart's not strong enough to take it."

"Not one of my stellar genius moments," Lily admitted sheepishly. "I'm sorry I'm such a dunderhead, honestly I am. But there are _no_ babies for me in the offing."

_There was one, and he should be in my arms, but he's not . . . he's gone . . ._

"Lily." Mum's voice was horrified again. Lily angrily swiped away a few more stray tears. It would be so much easier if she could sob her heart out and get past it, but she thought if she began to cry she'd die of weeping. "You didn't . . . you didn't _lose_ . . . you weren't . . . you didn't get rid of—"

"I'd never get a—" The very idea made Lily sick. Her eyes filled with tears again, and this time they spilled over. "I'd never," she gasped.

Mum stared at her, and then folded her in her arms again. "Oh Lily," she whispered. "Oh, my baby girl. You should have told me. I'd have been there for you . . . nothing is more important to me than your happiness, nothing . . . "

Lily blinked for a moment before she understood: now Mum thought she'd been pregnant and lost it. And Lily couldn't find the strength to contradict her, because although her mother didn't know, it was the truth. She had lost Harry. She'd died and left him to a monster, because she hadn't been strong enough to save him. Death should have been a release from that pain, but it hadn't been anything like it was supposed to be.

But here was her mother, who'd been gone for two years, holding her now and giving Lily love, all her comfort . . . so Lily took it.

* * *

 

_December 24, Christmas Eve, 1976_

The homeless shelter wasn't bad, all things considered. Severus didn't have to try to teach anyone Potions. There were no Carrows giggling madly to themselves, drooling into their morning tea, or children looking at him with loathing. There was no Albus' portrait destroying Severus' tenuous, savage peace, or Minerva staring at him as if he'd ripped out her heart and smeared it all over her face. No snake coming to stab its fangs into his ravaged throat, or a ragged Potter standing over him like he had expected to feel triumph and got only sickness.

And on a more present scale, he did not have to listen to his mother insult him or his father, or his father insult him or his mother, or have to refrain from insulting either of them for a cuff upside the head. For the present, he didn't even have Potter the Elder or Black to taunt him about being ugly, greasy, and living in a homeless shelter.

The food was decent, too. It had nothing on Hogwarts, but Severus hadn't expected it to. There was soup and bread with margarine, and an old man who reeked to high heaven promised they'd get some roast chicken for Christmas dinner tomorrow, and they wouldn't be turfed out, but allowed to stay inside and watch the telly, because it was Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, however, they had to leave for the day. Severus killed some time by drifting into the church and listening to Church of England-ites sing hymns. He only recognized some of them because the students at Hogwarts liked to fill them in with rude lyrics. God, he hated teenagers.

He realized with a sickening thud of his common sense that unless he made a drastic change, he was going to have to go back and live with them. _Shit_. Maybe he'd say bugger the war after all and take off for a distant land . . . perhaps he could become one of the homeless, and sit at the train station with a hat on the floor and a dog at his side, collecting change. One of the homeless women had confided that people took more pity on you when you had a dog. "Like dogs better'n us," she'd said. Severus didn't have any trouble believing that.

When the pressure from the uncomfortable pew started to fuse his bones together, he got up and spent a few moments marveling how he didn't need to stretch; his body just sprung back into shape. Ah, youth.

Still, all things considered, it could go fuck itself.

He wished he hadn't given all his money to that waitress last night. Perhaps he could charm the wallets out of people's purses. No; he was still underage. He'd have to take up begging until he came of age; then it would be professional pick-pocketing all the way.

Unfortunately, on Christmas Eve most places were closed where he could have spent the day tucked up snug and warm. He dawdled for a bit in a laundromat, swiping a pair of socks, then loitered in a grocery shop (even filching a bit to eat and not feeling remotely guilty), and then ambled down to the train station, where he shared some of his pork rinds with a beggar from the shelter who'd set up shop there. She gave him five pounds in change. "People get generous round the holidays," she said.

He also passed by Lily's, going around the back way and sneaking through a neighbor's yard to get to her street from the opposite end. But the car was gone from their driveway and their windows were dark. He vaguely recalled a tradition of going to see her Gran, who was in a nursing home with Alzheimers. He'd never been able to understand why they'd go, since she had no idea who they were and Lily came home depressed, her mother weeping, and Petunia nastier than usual.

Now, he wondered if he would have gone if it were Lily. Even if she'd forgotten him, would he still have tormented himself like that?

 _You even need to ask?_ asked snide little voice he thought of as his inner Slytherin. _You've made a philosophical movement out of self torment_.

He told his inner Slytherin to bugger off, and walked down by the river, thinking that when he became a beggar, it would be in a town by the sea.

Lily hadn't seen Gran in years; she'd passed away before Mum died. It was a shock seeing her again, and not a good one. Particularly since she'd forgotten how Petunia's grief made her especially vicious. They drove home in a tense net of silence and misery.

 _What a Christmas Eve—my husband dead, my son, too, and probably all my friends, and for sympathy company I get my delightfully nasty sister, being more delightfully nasty than ever_.

She pressed her forehead against the icy window glass and watched the naked, frozen trees strip by. She wondered what Severus was up to. How did his family spend Christmas? He'd never gone home for it that she remembered . . . except obviously he had done this year . . . but at the time she'd been pretending to everyone, especially him, that she'd forgotten he existed. She had pretended so hard that she'd hardly seen him those last two years of school.

As the ice-flecked trees and grass gave way to buildings, cars, and a few straggling Christmas shoppers, she dithered on whether or not to go hunt him up. Was she a Gryffindor or wasn't she? She had _died_ —she couldn't experience anything worse than what she'd lived through two days ago . . .

At least, she bloody _hoped_ not.

"I'm going for a walk, Mum," she said as they climbed out of the car.

"In this weather?" Mum frowned up at the sky, which was a hard, unforgiving gray with the lurking menace of snow. An earlier snow, now dirty and crushed, lay scattered in the gutters, and patches of ice reflected the ugly sky all down the sidewalk.

Petunia snorted as she went up to the front door. Lily summoned all her Gryffindor courage to refrain from hexing her sister into next Christmas.

"I need to clear my head," she muttered. She squeezed her mum's hand, saying, "It's fine, this coat's warm, you know that."

Mum looked like she might cry. Lily wasn't sure she could walk away from that, so she swiftly kissed her mum beneath her eye, bumping their cheekbones, and took off, digging her hands into the shearling-lined pockets of her jacket.

She found a phone booth to look up Severus' address in the phone book, since she didn't remember it. There were several Snapes, but only one on Spinners End.

She had only been to Severus' street once. He had always been adamant that she not go, but once, when she was about thirteen, she'd sneaked down there anyway. She'd never seen such . . . poverty as that. It had made her heart ache, seeing people so worn down by living, thinking of Sev growing up there . . . only Severus had never seemed worn down.

He'd always seemed chock full of intensity, as if the forgotten passion of everyone else on that street had been funneled into him.

She'd never told him she'd gone there. She hadn't taken more than a few steps down the street, anyway, before turning and running before Severus could find her out. He'd have been so furious, she knew . . . so humiliated, because he was like that; thinking sympathy was scorn and charity an insult.

"And here I am," she muttered, "walking right up to his _house_ this time." She thought of his livid face last night outside the play park. "He'll probably blast me into the river."

The street was the same as before, weary and decrepit. She tried to walk like she didn't notice, telling herself she was being vain and stupid for imagining people staring out their windows at her. As if anyone would even be interested—they'd have far better things to worry about.

There. Severus' house, at the end of the street. Past the chain-link fence, she could see the sluggish river, flecked with trash.

She picked her way up the cracked path to the door, raised her hand—and let it hang there. _You've faced the Dark Lord_ , she scolded herself, and then scolded back, _I have, and this IS scarier._

She knocked. The numbers on the door were hanging off; the paint was peeling, and the front window had a huge crack in it.

Silence. A long one.

She forced herself to knock again, louder this time. The seconds clawed their way past her, strangling her patience, shredding her resolve. Oh shit, was someone staring at her from behind a curtain in the house to the right?

Footfalls on the other side; a latch scrabbling. Lily almost screamed and Apparated away—but the door was flung open, and she was staring in a terror at Severus' mother.

" . . . the hell is someone at the door on Chrissmas . . . " a man shouted from inside the house, his words a bit slurred.

"Shut up!" Mrs Snape barked over her shoulder. Then she fixed Lily with a look that made her feel about five inches tall, and snapped, "What do you want?"

"I—I'm—"

"Spit it out, or get off my porch."

"I'm looking for Severus," Lily blurted. "Is—is he here?"

The woman's dark eyes glittered at her. She looked Lily up and down. Lily had never known it was possible to put so much contempt into a single expression.

"He lives here," she said, her voice an echo of that soft, cruel mockery Lily had heard in Sev's voice last night. "But he didn't come home last night. Perhaps he's shacked up with some whore. Looks like you should keep stricter hold of him." Abruptly the softness was gone; Mrs Snape snarled, "Get off my front porch, you stupid girl," and slammed the door in Lily's face.

Lily stood for a moment staring at the peeling paint and shaking. She didn't know why, but she felt as if she'd just escaped thirteen armed Death Eaters.

Had Severus' mum always been like that? She racked her memory, and found one almost without effort: the first summer back, tugging Sev across the platform to say hello to her parents, and his mum coming over to haul him away—Lily's mum and dad had said hello, her mum had even held out her hand, and Mrs Snape had looked at the hand as if it was covered in dog dung and dragged her son away without a word. Lily had remembered it for years afterward, secretly hating Severus' mum, for introducing her to mortification, for making her parents' faces flash with hurt . . .

 _What a vile,_ foul _woman_ , she thought to herself, fleeing the Snapes' lot. _If I were Severus, I'd have run away YEARS ago!_

But where was Severus? Panic seized her—he hadn't gone home last night—but she strangled it to silence so she could think.

She could see plain as day why he'd be avoiding that wretched place—although her thought from earlier returned, that Severus almost always had avoided his house during holidays and stayed holed up at Hogwarts. What was he doing home this year? It must be something really important to drag him away from school, which he loved so much he used to become inconsolably bitter before the start of every summer break—

Lily felt like she'd swallowed a bucket of ice. Something important . . .

. . . like Death Eater initiations?

She forced herself to breathe. She had no proof—nothing but a wild guess—and Severus was still in school, there was no way they'd . . .

But he'd be coming of age at the beginning of January.

Lily stood as if encased in ice. Then she took off running. She had to find Severus—to talk to him, to make him see how he could never become a Death Eater, no matter what he thought, no matter what he wanted—

She couldn't let him become a monster. Whatever she had failed to say or do right the first time around, she could not fail in the same way twice.

As the sun sank wearily beneath twilight's ethereal weight, Lily trudged back home. She was frozen, her feet ached, and her chest hurt. Maybe it was guilt, the remorse of failure. She'd looked for hours, but she hadn't been able to find Severus. Perhaps if she'd had an idea of where to go, but she hadn't. The failure had made her realize she had no idea where Severus had gone when he wasn't with her.

Then, as she was crunching across the frozen play park, she saw him. He was sitting on one of the swings, facing away from her, the hems of his too-short trousers riding up, showing a pair of horridly mismatched socks: one white with red and blue stripes, the other a nauseating shade of orange. His hair looked wet, but she knew it was just the accumulation of oil. He was ever-so-slightly rocking back and forth, pushing back with the balls of his feet and forward with the heels, filling the still, icy air with the thin creaks of rusted metal.

Her heart hurt.

Lily let her body decide what to do. She wasn't entirely surprised when it carried her over to climb onto the swing next to him. From the corner of her eye she saw him tense like she'd dropped a centipede down his collar, but he didn't say anything, and neither did she.

 _Be Sev again_ , she wanted to say. _Be my friend again. Who you were, not who you are. I need you._

"It's cold out here, Sev."

"December in the north of England frequently is."

It wasn't the soft voice but the empty one, just as bad—or bad in a different way. Was that another thing he'd learned in Death Eater training camp? How to manipulate the emotions of people around you with just your voice?

She looked at him, but he didn't return it; only kept staring ahead, his face slightly turned to the side, so that only his nose peeked past the clumps of hair that had swung down over his cheek.

"I went to your house," she said, trying to shock him into looking at her.

He twitched; she'd almost had him. "Did someone put you under Imperius?"

"I was looking for you."

His face turned so that she could see his eyes flicking toward her, over her. He had his mother's black eyes, but these were wary, not scathing. Not at the moment, at least.

"Why would you do that?" he half-whispered.

"Well, I wanted to see you, didn't I? The way I'm here right now." He didn't say anything. She could hear his breath whistling, quicker than before. "Sev, please don't run off. It took me hours to find you." _How long were you down the street from my house?_

"They'll be serving dinner soon," he said incongruously. "And your . . . family . . . will be looking for you."

She didn't want to imagine his mother's reaction if he failed to show up on time for dinner. "Mum will. Petunia will be sorry I didn't slip on a patch of ice."

"Cow," Severus muttered under his breath.

"Excuse me," Lily said, firing up on principle, even though she'd called Petunia far worse, "that's my sister you're talking about."

"I know. I remember Petunia."

There was something off about his reaction. She vaguely remembered him getting defensive or anxious whenever she snapped at him for saying something derisive about her sister, but now he was just raising his eyebrows at her faintly, as if to say, 'Well? No comeback?'

"Can we not talk about my family?" she said, trying to sound reasonable and not sure she did.

"I have no desire to talk about them," he said, although this didn't make her feel much better.

"Why do you have to be so—so _scornful_ of everything all the time!" she snapped, her patience fraying, even as she remembered his mother. Did that . . . _woman_ . . . look at Severus like that, the way she'd done Lily?

"Because I'm so good at it." Severus rotated his shoulders and stood from the swing. Lily scrambled up, too, in case he decided to bolt the way she'd done last night. "Do you want to tell me why you were hunting all over town, even braving the stinking depths of my house, to find me?"

Lily blinked, but she said, "I did tell you. I wanted to find you."

"Yes," he said flatly, shoving his hands in his pockets. "I'm waiting for the explanation as to why."

Lily opened her mouth and shut it. Then she blurted, "I don't want you to become a Death Eater."

Severus stared at her like she'd just spoken in Mermish. Then he said, "Oh? Why's that?"

Lily gaped at him. He was so—calm, so—she felt like a child who was trying to jump at something a grown man was holding out of her reach.

"Oh, I don't know, because they're _evil_? Because of what they do, what they stand for—"

"You don't know what Death Eaters do," he said, his calm sounding almost bored, but something in his eyes—

"Yes I do!" she shouted, because she did; she'd seen the remains of her friends, she'd been to the funerals, she'd cried for hours, she'd hidden in terror for her baby's life. "They torture people, they destroy families, lives—they destroy everything! They destroyed—" _You, us, my family, my baby—_ "They—"

Severus' eyes were boring into her. She felt her memories sifting like sand—the sight of green light, washing everything away; the scream of her voice for her son—

"No!" she screamed, and there was a bang, and Severus toppled backward. She vaulted over him and bolted, the way she'd been afraid he would do, back to her house, to a place she could hide and think how to explain this one—

She didn't hear him calling after her, which was just as well, because she wouldn't have stopped.


	4. Chapter 4

Severus lay on the frozen ground, feeling like Lily had blasted all his thoughts out of order.

He was confident in his powers as a Leglimens. And Lily had screamed _Harry_ in her head.

 _It's not possible_ , he thought, _it's not—_

 _Why not?_ asked his inner Ravenclaw, completely logical. _You're here._

He had to find out—find out if really—

His inner Ravenclaw took a moment to remind him that since he had come back, and he was confident in his Leglimency, then it really must have happened. But the part of him that couldn't believe it was pushing him up from the ground, running across the park, up Lily's street and to her house—

There, his inner Ravenclaw helpfully pointed out that going up and banging on the front door and shouting to be let in would only serve in making him look barking mad, and maybe get Mrs. Evans to call the police for a nice Christmas visit. How had he got Lily's attention in the past? There had been the classic tradition of pebble-at-window-tossing, but Lily had also scaled up the vines on the side of the house many times to get in and out of her room when Petunia was spying on her. Severus had always watched in a terror that the ivy would come loose and she'd fall and break her neck—

He tested the ivy, finding the trellis behind it, and began to climb. The lamp behind her shut curtains was lit, but he couldn't see her. If Petunia was in there snooping, trace or no, he'd hex the dozy bint—

He stretched out his arm and tapped on the window. Nothing. He waited a few long moments, then tapped again.

A dark shape swam up to the lamp-lit curtains. He heard Lily's low, frantic voice through the thin pane: "If that's you, Severus, go away!"

"Of course it's me, how many other people climb up to your window?" he hissed back.

She jerked the curtain to the side to glare at him, and then seemed to remember why she'd run off, because her eyes widened and she ducked back out of sight. "Go away!" she ordered, her voice muffled.

"Your son's name is Harry James Potter." He tried to make his voice pierce through the glass without alerting anyone but her. "He has—he has your eyes."

There was a long, tense, horrible silence. He drew in a ragged breath and said, biting the words out, "You married—" He couldn't say his name—"in August, 1979. The boy was born the following July."

The curtain flew to the side. Lily's face was a mask of anguish.

"How do you know that?" Her breath fogged up the glass, obscuring the bottom half of her face, leaving her haunted green eyes clear. "How, Severus?"

"Tell me what year this should be."

She stared, hardly blinking. Then she said, "1981."

The green light. His head dropped forward, his forehead pressed against the glass. She had died. She remembered dying.

He was going to find the Dark Lord and rip him open from bowels to sternum—

The window suddenly disappeared, topping him half into Lily's room. He handed with his face smashed into her desk, the sill digging into some of his most sensitive parts, his feet poking out into empty air.

"God—I'm sorry—" She was trying to roll him inside. He flicked her hands off and hauled himself inside, knocking half the contents of her desk to the floor, including her lamp. The light jolted up the walls, slanting its angle.

Her doorknob rattled. She gave it a look of horror, and Severus didn't need to be told; he squeezed himself into her closet, pulling the door shut behind him, but leaving it unlatched. He was standing on her shoes, probably getting grease all over her clothes, which carried the faint sweet tang of Muggle detergent and the scent of her home, gardenias and oranges and the pine-scented cleaner her mother used. Surrounded by it, he realized he was trembling, very lightly, almost imperceptibly trembling.

"Excuse me!" he heard Lily half shouting, so the visitor must be Petunia. Her mother would have knocked, anyway. "I'm _so_ sorry, but I was under the impression I was entitled to some privacy in my own house!"

"What were you _doing_?" Petunia demanded. Severus remembered her voice, nasal and swottish, and enjoyed a moment of uncomplicated loathing. "What happened to your desk?"

"Cornish pixies," Lily snapped. "Get out!"

"Why is your window open?" Petunia persisted, as tenacious as a Venomous Tentacula.

"GET OUT!" Lily shouted.

"You put that nasty thing away!" Petunia gasped. Lily must have drawn her wand. In the dark of Lily's closet, Severus bared his teeth in a savage little smile, imagining the terror on Petunia's face. "You aren't allowed—that freaky stuff—I know you're not!"

" _Get out_ before I forget!"

Lily's bedroom door slammed. Severus waited, silent. He could hear Lily's ragged breathing past the thin plywood of her closet door.

She kicked aside a canister of pencils and jerked open her closet door, her features still rigid with fury.

It was amazing what was coming back to him; so many things he'd forgotten that he'd once known as clearly as his own name. Right then, as if he'd looked into a notebook he'd kept through the years and seen it written there, he remembered: non sequitur usually brought Lily out of her temper. "I've squashed your shoes," he said inconsequentially.

She blinked, looking down. "Oh," she said. "It doesn't matter, they're only shoes." She reached in and pulled him out of the closet, and then just stood there, with her left hand on his arm, her wand in her right, staring up at him. Severus hoped to God he didn't reek like the people at the shelter, but it was probably an empty hope.

Then Lily said, "You didn't answer me."

"What?"

"Outside the window. You asked me—about the year—and then I said you're from there, but you just—hung there. That's why I opened the window."

"Oh." He shut the closet door with careful precision. "No," he said slowly. "I am not . . . from . . . 1981." She opened her mouth to ask; he said flatly, "1998."

Lily's eyes widened and her jaw went soft with shock. Severus took out his wand to spell the things back onto her desk, but she grabbed his wrist.

"Trace," she whispered, staring at him like she'd never seen him before.

He muttered several things under his breath, such as what the trace could do to itself with his everlasting good-will, and how hard and long, but stowed his wand and bent to pick her things up from the carpet. She got down next to him and did the same, but then just told him to dump it and she'd sort it later.

"We need to talk," she said. "Severus, stop fussing with it!"

"Multitasking is a valuable life skill," he said, unable to look at her.

"If you don't put that crap down, I am going to go utterly screaming mad."

He put her lamp down and took his hands away. Damn her. Now she was going to see his hands shake.

Except she herself was shaking. He didn't know what to do. He'd felt helpless many times in his life, many of those swirling in a nexus around her, but he loathed it—loathed how after all these years, even after dying, he was still here, feeling so bloody helpless.

"Did he win?" she whispered.

He was glad Lily was no Leglimens, so she wouldn't have to see him suppressing thoughts of _The second time? I don't know, I died before it was over._

"No," he said. There was scarcely any relief in her face. He knew what she wanted to hear. "He was defeated the night he came to your house."

Lily blinked.

"You died for . . . your son." She nodded, the anguish cracking over her face like ice spreading across a pond. "That is a powerful, protective magic. When the Dark Lord—"

"Don't call him that," she choked.

"—when he next cast the Killing Curse at your son—" Lily was shaking all over, harder now. "—it rebounded and struck the—You-Know-Who," he muttered. God, how he hated that asinine name. At least it sounded dignified to be destroyed by a Dark Lord. You-Know-Who sounded like a disgraceful shag you didn't want to name.

"Rebounded?" she whispered, still trembling, but now looking at him desperately, waiting for him to say . . .

"Your son was protected. He received a cut on the forehead"— _and a piece of the Dark Lord's soul_ —"but was otherwise unharmed."

Lily's eyes were enormous, tears spilling down her face. "Harry—didn't die?"

"No." He wanted to look away, but he couldn't. "Because you did."

Lily stared at him, eyes streaming, shaking all over, and then threw herself at him, locking her arms around his neck, banging their heads together, and burst into sobs.

Severus had no idea what to do. On the one hand, he had Lily in his arms, but on the other hand, she was sobbing her heart out over her son. While this was a perfectly logical thing for her to do, and he didn't necessarily mind the snot and tears she was getting all over his shirt, it didn't exactly tally with any of his daydreams.

And his position was rather uncomfortable; he'd leaned back out of reflex when she launched herself forward, and he was now awkwardly half-propped up between laying on his back and sitting up straight. He didn't know what to do with his arms either, because Lily had the upper parts trapped against his body. The whole experience was sort of like getting stuck inside a jumper as you were trying to get it off.

But even had his arms been free, he wasn't sure he'd have been able to put them around her. He couldn't even say her name, to get her attention. Those were two things he had given up all hope of ever doing since Hallowe'en seventeen years ago.

Sniffling, Lily pulled back enough to look up into his face, her fingers digging into her shoulders. Her face was blotchy with tears and her nose was all red. "And he's all right?" she whispered, her voice thick. "He's—he's happy?"

Severus couldn't truthfully say anything of the sort, but he had no intention of telling Lily the truth. He said, "He has many people who love him," which _was_ the truth, as far as things went.

Lily's smile sent a fissure through his heart. "Thank God," she whispered. "Thank God—my baby—" She dropped her head, pressing her face into Severus' shoulder, and to his despair continued to cry, although more quietly this time.

He raised his hand and realized it was shaking, but he gently touched it to her hair, anyway. Her only response was to grip him more tightly. So very lightly, he stroked his hand down the length of her hair.

Her bedroom door swung open. "Lily, what on earth is going—" Her mother took one step into the room and stopped as if she'd been hit with Impedimenta.

At the look on her mother's face, Severus almost, almost Apparated out, taking Lily with him.

Lily's head came up with a snap. He couldn't see her face from that angle, only the top of her head, but he clearly heard her say, "Oh fuck."

"Young lady!" Severus was impressed with her mother's whip-crack voice. She and Minerva might have gone to the same class on Refining Your Temper to Keep Unruly Adolescents In Line. "I don't have the slightest idea of what is going on here, but you will _never_ use that word in my presence, _ever_ again. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, Mum," Lily muttered. Severus kept expecting her to scramble off him, but she was acting as if he'd charmed her to stick there. "I'm sorry, I won't say it again."

"Thank you."

Her mother's next Minerva-worthy look was for him. Severus was suddenly quite sure that there were a great many ways to get Mrs. Evans to call the police on him, and lying sprawled on her daughter's bedroom floor was one of them.

"I will expect the pair of you downstairs in one minute to explain yourselves to me. Do not make me come back up here to find you, young lady, young man."

When she left, she did not shut the door.

"Won't say 'fuck' _around_ you, at any rate," Lily said in so low a voice Severus almost didn't hear.

"And yet, you waited for her to be gone to mutter that little rebellion," he noted. "Where's the vaunted Gryffindor bravery?"

"Up a tree, when it comes to Mum." She clambered off him, pulling him up with her. "Come on." She took the box of tissues he handed her, gave him a watery smile, and assured thereby that he'd follow her down to hell.

* * *

 

Harry lived. Harry was alive. Harry had lived.

Somehow this made all the difference. Even though it hadn't happened yet, in a way it must have, because Severus was telling her he'd come from 1998 and Harry was loved and happy and well. Good God, that was over twenty years in the future . . . that would make Severus . . . thirty eight years old!

She sneaked a look at him, as if expecting him to have suddenly aged twenty-two years in five seconds, but trailing a little behind her was the regular sixteen-year-old Sev, looking moody and unwashed.

A thirty-eight-year-old Sev. That explained a lot, like the voice, the glittering eyes, the near-deranged wildness, the odd responses. She'd been expecting him to act sixteen—naturally—and had predicated all her expectations over the way Severus had acted when they'd still been best friends, still two sixteen-year-old kids, thinking they were so wise and grown up and having no _fucking_ idea.

At the bottom of the stairs she hesitated, eying the opening to the living room. Mum was in there, and was going to read her the riot act as sure as James and Sirius were surely up to something harebrained at that very moment, wherever they were. And despite being, at heart, twenty-one years old and a Dark Lord-defier, Lily was not looking forward to this.

_I guess unpleasant things stay unpleasant, even when you've dealt with worse._

Severus leaned forward slightly, nudging her ear with a strand of his hair. It was soft and very tickly. She shivered. "You'll make her come after us if you dawdle."

"And here I thought you were going to say something comforting," she groused, taking the opportunity to wipe at her face one last time.

"We both remember how to Apparate."

"Not what I meant," she said out of the corner of her mouth, but something inside her smiled just the tiniest bit. No one quite knew how to be difficult the way Sev did.

"Then if in future, you'll give me a list of pre-prepared comforting remarks, I will be able to select the appropriate thing to say during tense moments."

"Berk," she choked, and then walked in to face her mother.

The tiny smile she'd been tempted to let loose went and hid at the expression on her mother's face. She'd never seen Mum look so—grim. Almost haggard.

"Mum?" she said in shock. She crossed to her mother to kneel down next to her, to ask what had happened in the minute they'd been apart, but her mother held up a hand.

"Lily, you may sit there." She pointed at one of the dining room chairs, which she had pulled across the room to a point about a metre and a half from her armchair. In fact, she'd pulled two of them, placing them at diagonal points to herself. Lily stared at the arrangement, noting that her stomach seemed to have vanished.

 _Oh fuck_ , she thought, using Sirius' favorite word. James had always winced when she said it, but then, he'd never cussed the way Sirius had.

"Lily," her mother said, her voice suggesting that she was losing her patience.

Lily blinked. Severus had taken the other chair, and both he and her mother were waiting for her to sit. She did, slowly, noticing that Severus sat the way he'd always done, his shoulders a bit hunched in, his spine curved, so that his hair fell down around his face. His eyes glittered at her. Lily knew that his appearance wouldn't be reassuring her mother the slightest bit, but she felt her heart swell, because by God, she had missed him, so much—

"Lily. If you cannot find it in yourself to be present for this conversation, I will have to speak to you and Severus separately."

"Sorry," Lily said hastily. "I just—I'm sorry." She wanted to ask what was with the courtroom set-up, but she didn't dare.

Mum gave her a long, somehow hard look. It was like staring down Professor McGonagall, or a hippogriff. Lily tried not to blink.

Then Mum turned the look on Severus. He stared back, still hunched down in that slight way, his black eyes glittering like moonlight on the water of a starless night.

"Severus," Mum said, "I am going to ask you a question, a very serious question. You must not lie to me, no matter what you fear the consequences are."

Severus only looked at her. Seeming to understand she was waiting for a response, he said flatly, "Yes, ma'am."

Lily realized that if Severus was really thirty-eight, her own mother was only a few years older than he was, now. She blinked. That had to be weird, to be in this situation when—

"Are you the father of Lily's child?"

Lily fell out of her chair.

Mum made a movement, but didn't help her up. Her eyes were boring into Severus. "Mum!" Lily managed, but her mother's swift glance down at her looked impatient. Lily realized Severus was trying to pull her up, and scrambled back into her chair.

"Where on earth did you get the idea that Lily is pregnant?" he said, sounding utterly bewildered. His honestly confused gaze turned on Lily. "What could you _possibly_ have said?"

"You will answer my question," said Mum in a hard voice Lily had never heard her use.

"I'm no one's father," Severus said. Oh God, he was starting to look amused. Lily prayed she could only tell because she knew his face so well. "Least of all your—grandchild's."

"Mum, no one is the baby's father because there is no baby!"

Mum pinned her with another hippogriff look. "I distinctly remember you crying last night, Lily, over losing a baby."

Lily's mouth open and shut. She was—screwed. She couldn't lie convincingly enough to tell her mother she hadn't been doing that, because she had been. What could she say—

"Oh, that," said Severus, making the two women look at him. "Lily, you should know better than to listen to that daft Felicity Meadowes. She couldn't find her arse with both hands."

Lily had no idea where he was going, but Severus would know that, because he said to Mum, "Meadowes fancies herself a fortune-teller. I heard at the end of term that she gave a particularly convincing performance, that one day a baby named Harry Potter would die at the hands of a Dark Wizard."

Felicity wasn't the only one who was convincing. But Mum was darting looks between Lily and Severus, so Lily summoned all her powers of deception—which were to Severus' as a thimble to an ocean, and held about as much water—and said, "Convincing is _not_ what I'd call it, Sev! It was—" She shuddered, allowing herself to remember her cold terror, thinking of Voldemort turning on her son once she'd died . . . "It was so real . . . "

Oh God, this was going to be _too_ convincing, wasn't it? She could feel her face losing warmth. Mum was never going to buy that it was just a stupid prediction— Stupid, yes, that was the key. "I was so stupid," she grit out. "That prat Felicity, she's wanted James for herself for years—"

"Too bad for her," Severus said, with a loathing sneer that Lily could tell took Mum aback. "No one could possibly come between the Golden Couple of Gryffindor."

"Oh please," Lily snapped, although her stomach swooped, "me and that prat? He's a lout. He deserves that Felicity! That was cruel, what she did."

"I'm confused," said Mum, not sounding much of it. She sounded firm, impatient. "Are you saying . . . what are you saying?"

Lily took a deep breath, tucking her hair behind her ears, going for gold. "Felicity told a fortune saying that a baby named Harry James Potter would die at the hands of a Dark wizard. He'd be named for his father, and he'd have—" Her voice faltered. "—his mum's eyes. My eyes."

Lily would have been proud at the way she managed to pull that together, if she wasn't so desperate for it to work. She didn't know what her mother would do to Severus if she thought he'd gotten Lily pregnant at sixteen, but she didn't want to find out.

"The attempt was no doubt an effort to get Potter to renounce his attentions," Severus said, sounding utterly bored. "Good luck to her—there's all the evidence of her rubbish divinatory abilities one could need: a full-scale collision with another planet couldn't stop Potter's attention."

Lily blinked. She'd never heard Severus put that much loathing into one word as he did into James' name. _Oh no_ , she thought, her heart sinking.

"Oh Lily," said Mum, sounding tired, "and you bought this?"

Lily blushed in spite of herself. "It—she's convincing!" Severus really had a stellar memory: Felicity Meadowes could exactly have done what he'd suggested. She had loved to drift about the castle, draped in colorful pashminas and her eyes lined with mascara, whispering people's fortunes. She had a particularly good bit where her eyes rolled up in her head and her whole body went rigid and twitched.

"She convinced more than Lily it was true."

"Lily, you know fortune-telling isn't real," Mum sighed.

There was an awkward pause. Severus picked at a hole in his trouser knee.

"It . . . Mum, in the magical world, it is." Mum blinked. "I mean, true seers are rare, but they do exist. You really can get . . . " She swallowed. "Prophecies."

For some reason Severus had gone white. He was staring at the finger-width hole in his trousers like his worst fear was inside it, etched onto that tiny spot of his knee.

Mum looked . . . not stunned, or disbelieving, but just . . . like something had shifted. "Oh," she said at last. "I . . . really?" Almost dazed.

"Yeah. But they're—you can't choose who they're told about, they just sort of happen. Like a sneeze." She darted a nervous look at Sev, who had put his hand over his mouth like he was about to be sick.

"Severus?" she asked, worried.

"Think I ate something bad at dinner," he said.

 _You natural liar, Sev._ "That can't be, at the park you said that dinner was . . . Sev!" He looked up, startled, probably at her tone of horror. "I made you miss dinner! What will your mum say?" She started wringing her hands, thinking of the horrible woman shouting, ' _Get off my porch, you stupid boy, and go back to that whore!_ '

"I sincerely doubt she'll care," said Severus, staring at Lily like she'd gone mad and started spouting prophecies about Petunia.

"You may go, Severus, once I get a few more things cleared up." Mum didn't sound as harsh as she'd done at first, but she didn't sound remotely friendly, either. "I would like to know what you were doing up in Lily's room when I didn't hear you come to the front door, like a proper guest."

"I Apparated in," Severus lied with perfect composure.

Mum's eyes narrowed. "I am aware that you cannot do magic outside of school."

"Only until one is seventeen. After that, we come of age, and we can do magic wherever we'd like."

Lily was impressed. Severus had managed to tell a blinkering lie without uttering an actual falsehood. Good thing Mum didn't know when Severus' birthday was.

Mum almost glared at Severus. "Wizard or no, Severus, I find the fact that you—appeared—in Lily's room without first informing her mother, whose house is this is, to be extremely rude."

"I didn't want you to know I was here," Severus said, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Mum didn't seem to know how to answer that.

"Mum," Lily said quietly. "Sev and I were—we've been fighting. He didn't think you'd let him in."

"And this . . . appearing? Could you stop him from coming in, if he didn't want to?"

"If Lily did not want me near her," said Severus, in a cold, deadly voice that made the skin on Lily's spine crawl, "I would not come."

Lily's heart sank at the expression on Mum's face. She just knew Mum was trying to think of a way to stop someone from Apparating into your house. And she also knew Mum wasn't going to let Severus in the front door anytime soon unless he blasted her out of the way.

Lily said to Sev, "I know you wouldn't," and took his hand, squeezing it. The look on his face at the sight of their joined hands was nothing like his mother's when Mum had offered a handshake; it was the opposite setting of Severus' no-middle emotions. She could only describe it as awed. It made her heart hurt. She knew how he felt—after so long of thinking she'd never see him again, here he was, sitting in her mum's parlor, young again . . . in a way.

"Thank you, Severus," said Mum in a very final tone. "I won't keep you any longer. You may go home."

Severus nodded. His black eyes were hooded, and he rose with a grace Lily had never seen belong to him. She wondered if he'd spent the past twenty-two years of his life learning how to be intimidating, because boy did he know how. Not that this was the greatest time to display it: Mum was pressing her hands into the arms of her chair, clearly not wanting to show that she wanted to lean away from him.

 _Fuck_ , Lily thought in the sanctity of her mind, glad her Mum wasn't a Leglimens like Sev. _Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck._

"Lily," Mum started when she went to follow him.

"I'll be back in a nip," Lily blurted, fleeing the parlor, even grabbing Sev in the hall and hauling him out the front door.

"What," he said, giving her a you-really-are-barmy look.

"I didn't want her to order me to stay back." She pulled him to the end of the driveway. "Are you—are you okay?" Why was she whispering? Right, because she wouldn't put it past Petunia to be hanging out the window, spying on them. She'd probably run to Mum and told her Lily was in her room with the window open in a very suspicious manner.

"I am perfectly well," he said, looking down on her. She tried to imagine him being thirty-eight. It was impossible while looking at his sixteen-year-old face, with a couple of whiteheads nestled in the corner of his nose.

"I just . . . Mum . . . " She felt miserable again.

"Lily, were you to combine the past, present, and future, you would still be one of only two people who has ever remotely, honestly liked me. Most people outwardly loathe me. Your mother's dislike is . . . so civil, it is almost inconsequential."

Lily blinked. "More people like you than that!" she protested, indignant.

"You will forgive me for mimicking my students and saying, 'As if.'"

"Your students?" she said, diverted. "You're telling me—you _teach_? You?"

"Not any longer," he said, his lip curling.

"But you hate people!"

"And after seventeen years of attempting to instruct countless loads of fatheaded brats who wouldn't know true intelligence if it hit them with a brick, I can assure you I have honed misanthropy to a precision that few have ever achieved."

Lily could perfectly picture Severus telling a bunch of wide-eyed first years that they were a bunch of fatheaded brats who wouldn't know true intelligence if it hit them with a brick. "I can believe it," she said, her turn to be awed. "What did you teach? Where?"

"Potions, at Hogwarts." When she opened her mouth, he sighed and said, with what was patience only for him, "Lily. Your mother, or sister, or both, is sure to come out here any second and haul you back inside, and I would like to be over the hedge before the police arrive."

"Wh—police? What police?"

"The police your mother will surely call if you don't go back inside and talk her out of it." He turned to go.

"That's it?" She could hear her voice choking up again. "You're just going to leave with that?"

He didn't turn around. Then he said in a harsh, full voice, "I was a Death Eater."

She fought to breathe. "I know. When you saved me—I knew then."

Even though it was dark, in the cast-off glow from the bright windows on their street, she saw him tense. His face turned ever so slightly, showing her the pale curve of his cheek and the jut of his nose. But he didn't say anything.

"I never told," she whispered. "I didn't want them to—take you away."

His breath was coming more harshly; she could hear it. She took a tentative step toward him. "Sev . . . "

"The moment he meant to kill you," he said, more harshly than she'd ever heard, so harshly she stopped in her tracks, "I was a Death Eater no longer."

And then he really did Apparate, cracking away into nothingness.


	5. Chapter 5

Lily stood for a few moments as the sound of Severus' disappearance dissipated, her arms tucked around herself for warmth, just listening to the sounds on the street. A knot of cars was snarled around one of her neighbors' houses, and she could hear strains of piano music and singing that was probably a bit drunken. Fairy lights winked up from eaves. The house next door had some strung from the rafters, but had forgot to put them on. The Petersons, she remembered dimly, fought a lot.

Shivering now, she walked slowly up the driveway and back into the house. Warmth folded over her as she stepped inside and pushed the door shut behind her. Her head felt—strange. She'd have expected it to be overfull, but instead it was like she had been turned into an enormous cavern, filled with so much space.

She saw Sev standing with his back to her on the sidewalk, the fairy lights blinking out of the darkness around him. _The moment he meant to kill you, I was a Death Eater no longer._

"Lily?"

She looked up; Mum stood at the parlor-room door. The shadowed lighting in the hall made her face indistinct, but Lily wearily braced herself.

"Yes, Mum?"

Her mother was silent for a few moments longer, and then she said in a low rush, "I don't want you seeing that boy anymore."

Lily had been expecting it, but her heart still twinged. _Here we go again_ , she thought sadly, _the Unsolvable Severus Equation: Part Two._ "Mum, please, can we not talk about this?"

"Lily—"

"You know I'm going to see him no matter what," she said, keeping her voice gentle and calm, because her mum had never been the type who seriously came between her daughters and their friends.

"I know," Mum said, but there was something—tearful, almost afraid in her voice. Lily felt her hackles rising, but she forced the feeling down.

_Mum has a right to be scared of Sev; he's a scary bloke. It's not her fault she doesn't know he wouldn't hurt me._

Lily had once been afraid of that, too, even when she'd also been terrified that would be caught and given to Dementors. But since the battle where he'd saved her, she had only feared one of the two. She'd known then that someone who risked his life to help you was never going to hurt you.

"Lily," Mum started, and then stopped. Lily walked down the hall to her mum and wrapped her arms around her, breathing in the sent of Mum's gardenias and oranges.

"It's all right, Mum," she murmured.

"No, it isn't. Lily, you fight with that boy for half a year—don't think I've suddenly forgotten how things were, at the beginning of the summer—and then last night I find you crying over a _baby_ and then suddenly you've—reconciled with him—with Severus? Don't think I can't tell there's a connection."

Lily tried to hide her wince, but she couldn't. Mum caught it; her gaze as it moved over her daughter's face was voracious, desperate.

"Tell me the truth, please, Lily," she said, but her voice had grown sad. Lily felt tears well in her eyes and blinked them back, but almost lost the battle when her mum placed a hand on her face. "He's the best liar I've ever seen—he would have had me convinced. But even if I weren't your mother, your face turns red when you lie."

Lily grimaced. "Stupid redhead skin," she muttered.

Mum smiled slightly, as though she weren't aware of doing it. The pad of her thumb drew a feather-light circle on Lily's cheek. "Lily . . . the truth?"

Lily bit her lip. She took in a deep breath, let it fill her lungs, swell them, and then pushed it out. "I . . . can't, Mum. I can't tell you." Mum just stared at her. "I wish I could, with all my heart, but I can't. It's . . . " She hesitated, and then said, "It's to do with—with that world, with magic. I _can't_ say anything."

She prayed this counted as enough of the truth not to make her telltale signs of lying show through. The irony wasn't lost on her: the hundreds of thousands of times she had wished, in the past two years, that her mum was still alive so she could tell her a million things—about James, Harry, even her terror for Severus' soul—and now here she was, and Lily couldn't say a thing.

Her mum gently tucked a few strands of Lily's hair behind her ear. "You're still my baby," she said, almost sadly. "I may not be a witch, but if anything hurts my baby, it will wish you never had me for a mum."

The tears sprung into Lily's eyes again so fast it stung. She smiled, although it hurt. If only life really worked out that way. She had once thought it would.

"You're the _best_ mum," she said, her voice shaking. She hugged her mother to her and felt Mum doing the same.

"Go on," Mum said, pulling away and giving Lily a nudge toward the stairs. "Fix your desk. I guess I'm lucky Severus didn't appear in the living room and wreck the good china."

Lily kissed her mum on the cheek and fled back upstairs, thinking that if her mum ever saw them Apparate, she'd realize that Severus had in fact climbed in the window tonight.

Severus Apparated on top of another innocent trashcan and sent it rolling down the alley, scattering its innards. For a few moments he lay on something wet on the cold floor of the alley, feeling something else wet trickling down on him from on high, ignoring the stench of chilled of trash left out in the winter air. He knew how the trashcan felt.

* * *

  _I was a Death Eater._

_I knew. When you saved me, I knew._

He was going to throw up. It had been years since he'd thrown up for anything except enduring the more rigorous forms of torture.

_This is torture._

He managed to keep his lunch of pork scratchings down, but probably only because he had metabolized it hours ago. In fact, in spite of what had just happened—what he'd just learned—he was starving. Except for his years at Hogwarts, his bottomless stomach had never had enough in it. And then as a backstabbing traitor, he had learned that there were times when it was simply unproductive to eat, just as he'd learned there were times when you should take the opportunity and not be . . . squeamish.

He picked himself up off the ground, out of the filthy rain water, and limped out of the alley, down the block to the shelter.

Choir music thrummed through the thin walls as they ate more soup for dinner, probably because it was warming. As he was scraping his bowl clean with his finger, the homeless woman who'd given him five pounds—God, was it only earlier that day?—turned up at his table with some pre-packaged sweets and gin to share.

"What happened to your people?" she asked him. In the warm interior of the shelter, she smelled as bad as any of them. Severus expected he was soon going to reek the same, if he didn't already.

"I'm better off without them," he told her, which was the truth. She nodded and offered the bottle of gin, but he took a Ding Dong instead. He'd never been a drinker. He had never cared for the taste of alcohol or the way it made him feel: dizzy and drowsy and sluggish; and then there'd been that Muggle medical article he'd read as a teenager, which linked alcoholism in families. So he had always limited himself to two glasses of wine at most, because you had to drink wine when you were friends with Malfoys. At least Lucius had always thought him too déclassé for the good brandy.

After the lights were put out, he lay on his cot, not remotely sleepy, but weary, so weary, the kind that made him wish he had just stayed dead. Whatever had brought him here, couldn't it have picked someone else?

Lily was not sixteen; she was twenty-one, and she had died, as well.

Really, Severus thought, even in death, he got the arse-end of the deal.

He rolled onto his side, sinking into the empty embrace of Occlumency, trickling away from Lily's memory of blinding green light. That was the thing about Leglimency: once you were inside someone's head, their memories became your own.

* * *

 

Christmas, December 25, 1976

Lily awoke the next morning to the sound of Petunia stomping up and down the hall, banging all the doors open and shut and, once she'd exhausted that pastime, running a vacuum cleaner across the carpet. Lily figured this was spite for Lily's pulling her wand out yesterday. When Petunia made sure to ram the vacuum against the bottom of Lily's door, she was sure of it.

Still, she lay in bed, refusing to give her sister the satisfaction of hearing her up and about. She'd had an odd dream last night—well, as far as dreams went, not that odd, but . . . somehow unexpected, perhaps? And yet not. Oh, she didn't know.

She'd dreamed she was walking on one side of a river, a river that smelled of the ocean. There were no smells in dreams, of course, but she remembered thinking, "That's strange, I can smell the sea." And then she'd looked across the water and seen Severus, but one she barely recognized, because he looked so much older, even though he was still so incontrovertibly Severus.

In the dream she called to him, "Sev!" even though he was already looking at her. "How did you get over there?"

He said, "I don't know," in that smooth, perfect voice, emptied of emotion. "How did you get over there?"

"Is there a way across?" she wanted to know.

He said, "I suppose we shall have to wait for the river to narrow." And they had walked on, to either side of the river, but it stayed the same width. Then Severus said, "It smells of the sea," and Lily had woken up in darkness, some hours before dawn, thinking that Severus' voice reminded her of the ocean.

The vacuum cleaner powered off with a grinding noise and rattled back to its closet, and Petunia thumped downstairs. She would be cooking Christmas dinner, and she never let Lily into the kitchen. That was fine with Lily; she hated domestic things, perhaps because everyone expected her to do them, as a woman.

She folded back her covers and wiggled her toes into her slippers before freeing herself from the warmth of her bed. For a moment the ghost-feeling of her morning routine tugged at her, wanting her to go check on Harry, fix a pot of tea, drink a cup in the silence of the kitchen, alone; and then ghost back into her and James' room to raise her son from his crib. The feeling of pressing her son's body to her heart had been warmer than a cup of hot tea.

She pressed her hand to her eyes until she saw needle-point spots. _Severus said he was all right_ , she told herself. _Severus says he was happy and loved. Lots of people love him._

If Severus had taught Potions at Hogwarts, then he'd have been Harry's teacher . . . all the while Harry was at Hogwarts. Sev would know things about Harry—he'd be able to tell her what Harry was like, who his friends were, how he was clever, what he was best in—so many things that she didn't know, that she'd been afraid she never would.

All but one thing that she had dreaded until she thought her heart would never beat calmly again had come to pass. Harry had survived, but she hadn't been there to see it.

She took a few deep breaths, trying to steady herself, to stop from shaking, from feeling sick. She would see Severus today, and he could tell her all about Harry then.

Lost in trying to think of a way to slip out and see Sev, she didn't realize what outfit she was pulling on until she caught a glimpse in her wardrobe mirror and saw she had somehow anti-coordinated an awful orange cardigan and a red-and-brown-striped skirt.

"Like bad taste threw up," she muttered, scrambling out of them.

Since it was Christmas, she deigned to change into a green jumper. Mum had always tried to coax her into wearing green, as it set off her eyes, and Lily's friends would gush whenever she wore that particular shade of emerald. "All the boys will go crazy!" they would say enviously. Lily always had to bite back a snarl of annoyance at the implication that making boys crazy was the height of her life's ambition. Hardly any of the girls at Hogwarts understood the feminist movement. The boys' failure to do so went without saying.

Downstairs, she heard the murmur of Mum's voice floating out of the kitchen, mingling with the clank of pots and the hush of running water. She circled around and came at the kitchen through the dining room, where she found Mum ironing the good table cloth while Petunia cooked. Both women stood in little spirals of steam, Mum's from the iron, Petunia's from the pot on the stove, into which she was dropping shallots.

"Happy Christmas, sweetheart," Mum said, leaning to the side to give Lily a kiss without stopping her ironing. Lily was thankful that as a witch, ironing wasn't something she needed to do.

"I've got everything under control," Petunia said sharply, stirring her gravy, eyeing Lily like she was about to jump in and start conducting Petunia's symphony.

Lily had to admit that Petunia was an amazing cook, especially for a person who didn't seem to care about _eating_ food. Sev had once suggested that because Petunia couldn't be a witch, she'd decided to be the best ordinary person she could be and show Lily up that way. At the time, they'd gotten into a fight over it—Lily hated it when Sev sneered over Petunia, the same way she hated it when Petunia sneered over Sev—but now Lily had to concede his point. Petunia knew how to keep a house as pristine as a block of ice. Even Mum, who had been a housewife for almost twenty years, couldn't keep things as immaculate as Petunia could. Of course, Mum didn't go for immaculate, but Lily had seen a look of awe on Mum's face the time when Petunia produced napkins folded in the shape of swans.

"I knew you would," Lily told her sister, with a sweet smile. "I just came to see if Mum needed any help."

"You could polish the silver for me, that would be lovely."

Petunia frowned, no doubt wanting to offer to do the silver herself and vaunt her superior polishing skills, but Lily knew she was shrewd enough in the kitchen to realize she couldn't do both. Lily rustled up the silver from its drawer, got out the smelly polish, and sat at the table to clean it, feeling as she did so as if she were getting mildly high from the fumes.

She needed to get to Severus. Surely he'd gone home again? Although, if he were really thirty-eight, she could see where he'd want to avoid that dreadful place—no, make that at _any_ age—but where else would he go? She had forgotten to ask him where he'd really spent the night. She was really the _worst_ kind of long-lost best friend.

Mum wouldn't be thrilled about Lily's nipping off to see a boy the family couldn't stand, so she needed to wait till after dinner, when Mum and Petunia would be settled in front of the telly with coffee and a dollop each of Bailey's. They always watched recycled footage from the London Symphony Orchestra playing the Nutcracker Suite. If this year followed the same routine as the previous, the year of Petunia's kitchen coup d'état, then Lily would be able to get to Sev's around four. And Petunia adored routine even more than cleanliness.

"Is this enough, Mum?" Lily asked, indicating the three knives, forks, and spoons she'd polished.

"It looks perfect to me."

"Soup spoons," said Petunia from the stove. "And the pie server, and the good ladle, and the salad forks."

"Surely we can make do with what's in the drawers?" Mum asked.

"It's _Christmas_ , Mummy."

"It's fine," Lily said, waiting till she was at the china hutch with her back to her mother and sister before rolling her eyes.

"And the Christmas china, Lily," Petunia said, a thread of triumph in her voice. "You'll want to make sure to wash that."

"Of course," Lily said, her sweetest yet. As she stirred her gravy, Petunia looked almost—happy.

So Lily polished, washed dishes, and arranged the table cloth—or tried; apparently she was cocking it up, because Petunia appeared abruptly at her elbow and butted her out of the way, saying, "Honestly, Lily, what kind of wife will you make? I can see that's crooked from the _kitchen_."

Lily wanted very badly to retort that James hadn't given a damn how she straightened her table cloths, but managed to swallow it. She swallowed even harder the urge to ask Petunia how she'd gotten the table cloth to look that— _perfect_.

Petunia wrested the china from Mum's hands when she tried to sneak up to the draining board and dry it . "No, Mummy," she said. "Today is for me and Lily to do. We're practically grown women now; you can rest."

"Oh yes, sixteen and eighteen, all grown up," Mum said, smiling, but when she kissed Petunia on the cheek, her eyes were misted.

Petunia's table settings were as fine as a duchess'. She had Mum sit at the head of the table and directed Lily where to place the food, but thinned her mouth and primly adjusted each platter once Lily had put it down. The scents of roast chicken and gravy and garlic and parsley made Lily's mouth ache with longing, and she got a very nasty look from Petunia when she stuck the scoop in the potatoes before Petunia had even begun to say grace.

"You've done your job too well, Petunia," Mum said, her eyes sparkling with laughter. "Lily can barely contain herself."

"Hurry," Lily moaned.

Of course, Petunia took "hurry" to mean "back up." While Petunia launched into a grace of unnecessary length, Lily found herself lost in the differences between this setting and Christmas with James and the boys. Sirius and Remus and Peter were always invited, too, and always came; and James and Sirius would let off the most extravagant crackers and boxes of Zonko's Christmas fireworks, inevitably setting something on fire for a few seconds, before Lily or Remus—often both, since it was rare that only one surface went up in flames—doused it with icy water. After dinner—which was usually a cross between the exotic and bizarre, whatever takeaway Sirius and Remus had unearthed from Thai or Cambodian or Moroccan restaurants—Remus would play carols on the piano, and they would all sing one or two seriously, until Sirius and James degenerated each song into a series of rude mad libs.

She felt the shaky feeling thread over her again and had to take a drink of water. God, she wanted to see James. If only she could get to him—

Wait . . . she could, couldn't she? She could take the train. For a moment she was dazed that she hadn't thought of it before. James wasn't dead, now, he was _here_ , he was _alive_ , and she knew where his parents' house was. She could find him and see him, and hear his voice and touch him . . .

"Lily?" Mum asked quietly. "Are you all right, dear?"

Lily fought back an urge to scream. Life really had a sick sense of humor, didn't it, the way it gave you blessings and turned them half into nightmares. Here she was, reunited with her mum, who loved her, and able to see her husband again, who'd died, and with Sev, who _wasn't_ really a Death Eater, and she had to _fake_ everything, the whole time; except with the one person everyone was going to give her constant grief for trusting again—

She tried a smile, not sure how successfully she managed it. Judging by the shrewd, narrow way Petunia was watching her across the gleaming table, and her mother's grave face, not too well. "Spectacularly Christmassy, Mum."

Petunia calmly carved a piece of chicken. "It'll be that Snape boy," she said, in a voice that somehow managed to be both sneering and nonchalant. "He's done something horrid, I expect, as anyone could've told anyone else he'd do. As ever."

"Petunia," Mum said, her voice its quietest yet.

Lily's hands were so tight on her silverware her fists were shaking. "As a matter of fact, Severus has done nothing but be wonderful," she grit out, feeling her teeth grind. "So if you could shut your trap about him, I'd be eternally grateful."

"Lily!" Mum said, with finality. Two spots of color were high in Petunia's cheeks and her nostrils were flared, but she didn't say anything. "That is enough from both of you. Lily, I won't have you speaking to your sister that way. Petunia, Lily is entitled to her private life, the same as you or I. I consider this subject closed. We will find something more pleasant to discuss on Christmas."

"Yes, Mum," Lily said, to Petunia's overlapping, "Of course, Mummy."

The dining room fell silent, save for the clink of silverware.

* * *

 

Severus made up his mind to stay at the shelter until they'd been fed, and then return home for luxuries like a shower and a change of clothes. There wouldn't be a lot of food at home, his mother deeming it unnecessary to spend money on things like that, so he'd take the free handout and even a few minutes of _Scrooge_ with Albert Finney that was playing on the telly. Severus wondered if he felt more like the ghost of Christmas Past, Present, or Yet to Come.

Around two in the afternoon, Severus left the shelter and headed home. The sky looked particularly ugly, with jagged gray clouds hanging low. A scant handful of cars dotted the streets between the church and Spinners End, all driving carefully on roads patchy with ice. His street was deserted, although the houses thrummed with chatter and low-scale Christmas merriment. The house four down from his seemed to be in the midst of a screaming row with about twelve people.

He pulled his key out of his wallet, where he'd tucked it, and slid it into the lock on the back door. No wards blasted him across the weed-strangled yard, to his half surprise.

The house was, as ever, dark and depressing and chilly inside, but unusually quiet. That meant his father wasn't home. Severus recalled that he'd usually drunk Christmas away at one of his mates' houses. Every year they managed to make their wives feel sorry for Tobias, whose wife was so bizarre and heartless she never fixed him a proper Christmas dinner. Instead she mocked him for liking his malt above the water a little too seldom.

The stairs were at the back end of the hall, but before Severus could proceed up them, his mother appeared at the door to the sitting-room. "Thought that was you," she said, looking neither pleased nor annoyed to see him. Her reading glasses were on the end of her nose.

"Because I didn't fall stinking pissed over the threshold?" Severus asked.

She lifted her eyebrows, like she'd have expected him to know the answer to that. "Naturally."

Severus wanted to go upstairs, but he didn't want the screaming row that would result if he simply walked off on her. He remembered that the best strategy with his mother was to wait out her silence.

"Did they feed you, wherever you went?" she asked, as though she didn't care either way.

"Yes" was all he said.

"I thought you might have made up with that girl," she said, "but she came here yesterday, looking for you."

"She told me."

His mother gave him a long look. In the dimness of the hall, Severus wasn't sure whether it was more measuring or considering. When she spoke, the soft seriousness in her voice surprised him.

"Be careful, Severus," she said.

Then she turned back into the sitting-room. He heard her chair creak as she returned to it, the rustle of her book pages. He stood for a moment, bewildered on a half dozen different levels. Then he mounted the stairs slowly to the second floor.

The air up there was stale and dry. Severus combed disdainfully through his wardrobe, trying to find the least horrible things to wear, but the nicest thing he owned was a jumper Lily had bought him—it would be last Christmas, now—in a deep cobalt blue. The sight of it filled him with a strange kind of grief, probably because he still had it—or he had—would?—in 1998—tucked at the bottom of his chest of drawers in the headmaster's office. He had almost never worn it; in part because the sleeves had been too short once he'd hit his growth spurt, but also because he'd wanted to preserve it, the way he had preserved everything Lily had ever given him.

In the cramped bathroom, he touched up the pipes with a heating spell and showered, using a truly sadistic potion-based shampoo to scour possible lice or other vermin from his hair. As he cleaned out the dirt under his fingernails—how had they gotten so foul?—he stewed over that frankly bizarre scene downstairs.

What had his mother meant, " _Be careful_ "? Well, it was obvious she was advising him to be careful, but careful of what? She couldn't care about him losing his friendship with Lily; she had only tolerated Lily before Hogwarts because to his pure-blood mother, a Muggle-born witch was at least better association for her half-blood son than outright Muggles. Once he'd started Hogwarts, she had constantly nagged him to associate with "better sorts than Gryffindors and Muggle-borns, Severus—how can they possibly further you?"

He had never quite asked her why she married his father. The closest he'd ever come was during one of her lectures on the importance of making decent connections in their world, when he'd dared to inquire, "But then why am I a half-blood?" And she had looked at him for a long moment and said, "I wish for you to make better choices than I did, my half-blood Prince."

He washed out the shampoo and gently toweled his tender scalp, then fluffed his hair dry with a charm. Poor Lily, having to live in a house with Muggles—Severus had figured out around fourth year that the Ministry could only monitor magic in households, not on the individual scale. As long as his house was registered as a witch's dwelling, he was safe to do magic inside its walls, no matter how young or old he was.

Shower done, too-small clean clothes on, he retreated back into his den—otherwise known as his decrepit bedroom—and started searching for a clue, any clue, as to that darkly circled date on his wall calendar.

Three hours later, he'd gone through all his notes, all his books both school and recreational, his wastebasket, his pockets, his bags, the detritus in his trunk, his bedsheets, his desk; even the hideaway panel he'd built in the foot of his wardrobe to hide his keepsakes from Lily. He'd found nothing, nothing at all.

He sat back on the bed, his hands on his knees, and stared across the room at the calendar. He knew himself; he had circled it, and then deliberately left no mention of it in writing. A strong reminder with no frame of reference.

So it was something he would have remembered without putting in writing. That meant he wouldn't have _wanted_ to put it in writing. Something he wanted to be sure he wouldn't forget, while knowing he'd need no reminder . . .

The phone downstairs jangled throughout the house. When the shrill sound abruptly cut off, he figured his mother must have silenced it, because she had never once answered it.

Two minutes later, the phone began to ring again.

"Severus!" she shouted up the stairs. "Would you silence that cursed piece of junk?"

Severus creaked down the stairs and picked up the receiver. "What?" he said in a bored voice, thinking it would be anyone but who it was.

"Merry Christmas to you, too," said Lily's voice. Severus almost dropped the phone.

"Where in the name of Merlin's lice-infested beard did you get this number?" he asked, bewildered.

"From this arcane text called a phone book." He had never heard Lily's voice on a telephone, he realized. It wasn't too different from real life. There was a familiar tone in it, like she might be smiling.

"Aren't you a riot," he said, his eyes on the sitting-room doorway. But his mother didn't come out to give him unnerving stares.

"I perform to a sold-out house. Look—" Her voice suddenly dropped and became muffled; he imagined her cupping her hand over the phone. "I need to make this quick before Petunia gets done playing duchess of the kitchen and comes out here. Can we talk?"

"I was under the impression that was the purpose of these devices. The fact that I can hear you from fifteen minutes away would support that idea."

"Wow, you've honed your skills of being difficult _and_ pompous at the same time."

"Thank you. I've worked very hard at it."

"If I talk to you on the phone, you prat, Petunia will make a court record of everything I say. I'd rather not have to interrupt myself to throw something at her every thirty seconds."

"Where do you suggest we meet? Your mother isn't going to let me in, and Petunia will spy on you as long as you're in the house."

"I know," she sighed. There was a beat, and some kind of weird, rubbery noise. Was she winding the phone cord? "I could go over there," she offered.

"Over—" He couldn't finish the thought.

"You know. Your house."

Severus was surprised when the flash of panic this offer inspired was . . . dull. An echo, really. He supposed he didn't really think of this as his life anymore.

"I did go by there yesterday, you know," Lily added, when he remained silent.

"I—" He couldn't think of an objection. It would even be slightly warmer in his parents' house than out in the park. "All right, it's adequate. I'll come walk you."

"Don't be silly, I know the way." And she hung up before he could say anything more.

 _Pushy woman_ , he thought without any rancor.

"I was under the impression that you ought to ask me before you invited . . . company over."

Severus had known his mother would be listening. He turned; her expression was coolly unamused. It reminded him of the stare he would give overachieving Ravenclaws.

"Will you permit Lily to come over?" he asked in his most neutral voice. "Or should I"—what was the word?—"ring her back and tell her to stay?"

His mother's lips went thinner than usual. He simply waited. Dumbledore had loved silent tactics, too.

"She can come," she said finally, her voice rather hard. "If I find you two doing anything inappropriate, I'll throw you both out on the street, and you won't find the wards down till the New Year."

She disappeared back into the sitting-room without asking if he understood.

"As if I'd get the chance," he muttered once he was safely back upstairs; much as Lily had done with her mother.

He doubted he'd have known what to do with such a chance, even had it arisen. It wouldn't.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I should maybe warn for the character death in this chapter - Tobias. It's totally off-screen, non-graphic, and you never even see the guy in this fic, but just in case.
> 
> Also, I originally called it the ER instead of the A&E. I tried to fix all of them but I might've missed a couple ("search" will highlight _every single word_ with an 'er' in it if you try to find them that way).

Whatever Lily said, Severus wasn't going to let her walk down his street alone after dark. Ten minutes after her phone call, he went to the end of the street to wait for her. When twenty minutes on the dark, slick street had ticked past and she still hadn't shown, he felt jitters begin to set in. He was just about to Apparate to her front drive, her mother and nosy sister be damned, when she turned around the corner, looking flushed and sorely aggravated in the sickly lamplight.

She jumped when he stepped into her line of sight. In the semi-darkness, her green eyes looked as black as his.

"Petunia," she uttered.

"Where's your umbrella?" he demanded, grabbing the lapel of her coat and hauling her under the dented umbrella he'd unearthed from the cupboard. The sound of falling rain pattered on the cloth above their heads. "It's bloody sleeting!"

"I was halfway here before I realized I forgot it."

"It's _sleeting_!" he reiterated, chivvying her down the street to his house. "How can you fail to notice half-frozen rain hitting you in the face?"

"You know, most people just content themselves with a 'merry Christmas,'" she said. Her smile was lopsided, and it made his heart beat in a matching off-kilter pattern.

He caught her looking around curiously as he led her through the creaking gate to the matchbox-sized yard round back, and then through the back door. Inside the hall, he flicked on the overhead electric light so she could see to walk. He wished the lamp didn't also show her the house, with its chipped wallpaper in a shade of yellow that should never have been invented, and the threadbare brown carpet that was equally affronting to the senses.

"We need to tell my mother you're here," he muttered as he shut the door. For some reason, Lily looked like he'd told her she needed to put her hand in a pit of scorpions.

He narrowed his eyes. What had his mother said to her yesterday?

"All right," Lily said bravely. Then she whispered, in a funny fake accent, "Very dangerous. You go first."

"Is that some sort of inside joke?" he asked.

"It's from _Indiana Jones_. I don't guess you ever saw it."

"Lucius desperately wanted to go, but I didn't think it was my thing."

Lily tried to smother her laughter, ending in a snort that was probably, in an objective sense, very unattractive, but which he thought was entirely adorable. He was pathetic.

In the time that he'd been dithering at the end of the street, his mother had progressed from the sitting-room to the kitchen, and was now cooking in a pot on the stove. Instead of using the fluorescent ceiling light, she had lit the Ambient lamp she favored, and it filled the kitchen with an eerie glow. It was like being at the bottom of a shallow forest pool. She didn't turn around when he and Lily hovered in the door.

More tactics. Inwardly, he sighed.

"Lily is here, Mother," he said, retreating into his Occluded voice.

She kept stirring. He resisted the urge to massage the point between his eyebrows. Lily chewed on her lip and gave him a desperate, pleading look, but while he would have happily brought her anything, from jewels to Sirius Black's head on a platter with a side of fish and chips, he didn't know what she wanted.

"Hello, Mrs. Snape," Lily said, like she'd rather have taken the pit of scorpions.

His mother extracted the spoon from the pot and tapped it against the rim with three dull _pings_ , and then finally turned to look at them. Severus wondered if this was how his first-year Hufflepuffs felt.

"Remember what I told you, Severus," she said at last, and then with a flick of her wand, started the sink running.

Lily followed him so closely up the stairs, she might as well have climbed onto his back.

"What did she say to you, yesterday?" he asked her suspiciously.

Lily went bright red. "Nothing. It was nothing."

"My desk lamp lies better than you."

"Of course it does, it hasn't got face muscles or redhead skin to give it away." When he only continued to regard her narrowly, she grimaced. "It wasn't—she didn't really say anything, okay? It was—can we please not talk about it? It's your _mum_."

"Yes," he said, half-shutting them into to his room, but leaving an old shoe shoved against the jamb to prop the door open, lest his mother blast them out the window in a fury. "And I know her charms. She treats everyone that way. It was not . . . necessarily anything . . . personal."

Lily stopped looking openly, curiously, and nosily around at his things to give him a weird look. "Even to you, she's like that?"

"It's the way she is," he said, feeling the familiar emptiness of Occlumency tinting the edge of his thoughts. Then abruptly he said, "You were right the first time; I don't want to talk about it." Lily looked like she didn't know whether to be relieved or upset. "Should I ask what atrocity Petunia committed or refrain?"

Lily put an admirable amount of exasperation into her sigh and pulled off her damp coat. She was wearing a green jumper he'd never seen before, and one he would never dare compliment. Lily's hatred of green had never made any sense to him, since it made her stunning in her beauty.

"Oh, it was stupid—" Lily smiled at him as he took her coat, which almost made him drop it; his hands shook as he hung it above the space heater, where the sleet spatters could dry.

"—she threw a bunch of dirty dishes at me just as I was walking out the door—not literally," she said, catching the look on his face. "I just mean she popped up with this self-satisfied little smile, wanting me to wash the dishes, since _she'd_ cooked."

"She never let you do any part of the cooking," he remembered, as it came back to him in a flash of memory.

Lily blinked. "Right," she said. She looked like she wanted to ask him something, but she didn't. "So she left me the dishes. I looked at the sink and could tell it was going to take _ages_ , so I—well—you remember how yesterday I caught you when you were going to fix my desk?"

"Oh." He could feel himself starting to smirk, because he never smiled, not any longer. "Rage drove it out of your head?"

"Yes, and stop smiling, you smug git!" She gave him a glower he could recognize as fake. "I hit them with one _mean_ cleaning charm—and not two minutes later an owl shot in with a warning from the bloody Misuse of Magic Office! Although when the owl flew in, Petunia did scream, so I suppose that's something," she said thoughtfully.

He snorted. Like smiling, he couldn't laugh properly anymore.

"And then she and I rowed a bit, and I had to explain to Mum what had happened, and then there was a bit of argument over—" Lily went pink and coughed, and he knew that her mother had asked where she was going and not liked the answer. "—anyway, it ended with Petunia being—well, _Petunia_ , so that's why I was ready to fling fire when you saw me."

"And why you didn't realize you were being sleeted on," he said sardonically.

"A polar bear could've come charging at me and I'd have kept going," Lily said, "if the alternative was going back to Petunia. Sev, why are we just standing around in your room?"

"The alternative being?"

"Sitting, of course!"

"Well, you're a Gryffindor," he said, giving the wooden chair at his desk the sort of look Crabbe's or Goyle's potions would deserve. "If you think you're up to the challenge of sitting in a chair that might drop you to the floor at any moment, please, be my guest."

"I'll take a shortcut and just sit on the floor," she said, folding down to it half-lotus. "I wouldn't want to hurt you, when you tried to hold in your laughter."

"I wouldn't hold it in," he said mildly.

Unexpectedly, Lily looked like she was about to cry. While Severus, in shock that such an innocuous remark (for him) would reduce her to tears, tried to find his voice, Lily seized him by the hand and whispered, "Sev, I _missed_ you."

He didn't trust himself to speak. That was the second time in as many days that she had touched him deliberately, not as a means to an end, or as a by-product of emotion that had nothing to do with him. He could only stare at her hand, the fingers clutched around his, thinking that he had never, ever thought—never even dreamed—that Lily could say, " _I know_ _you were a Death Eater_ ," and, " _I missed you_."

"Move closer to the space heater." His voice sounded like he'd swallowed glass. "Your hands are freezing."

"Sorry," she said, scooting across the floor to the heater.

"You don't need to be—" He stopped himself, because his tone came out harsh. He tried to even out his breathing. "I was not faulting you. I only—the house is cold."

Lily nodded, not saying anything, but Severus knew she was thinking probably a thousand things. He carefully did not look.

"Sev . . . "

Again, he found himself waiting. He tried not to watch Lily chewing on her lip, because the feelings it stirred made him feel like a pedophile. She might be twenty-one inside—although put like that, it still made him a pervert—but she _looked_ sixteen. Never mind that he did, too; the point was she looked like one of his students, and he'd never harbored any fetish for robes and schoolgirl ties. In fact, he loathed students. The sight of school robes and teenagers made him think of having to grade homework and write lesson plans. Ulcer-inducing material.

"I don't know where to start," Lily said suddenly, sounding frustrated. "I want to ask you ten trillion million things."

"I still hate Quidditch," he said gravely.

Lily snorted. "Okay, great. So that's only ten trillion, nine-hundred-ninety-nine-thousand, nine-hundred-ninety—"

"Stop. At once."

Her giggle almost sounded nervous. Then her expression shifted, like water spilling across a hard surface, and she said what he realized he'd been dreading: "Tell me about Harry."

Severus wondered if he had _really_ spent years learning how to lie to a dangerous madman so that he could conceal from Lily the fact that he had honestly, purely, and wholeheartedly hated her wretched son. He fell back into old habits like a tired man fell to a feather bed: let the asker lead the answers.

"What do you want to know?"

"I—what's he like?" She was clutching her hands in her lap, her expression desperate, almost hungry.

"He's—" _Mediocre to the last degree._ "—good at Quidditch."

"And you _hate_ Quidditch. What position?"

"Seeker. From his first year."

Surprise flitted into her expression. "But that's—"

He related that little episode, careful to amputate his disgust and fury and replace it with records of Minerva's pleasure and triumph. And when Lily beamed at him, her beautiful eyes damp, he found the old rancor from that long-past development actually . . . fade. It surprised him.

"What else? What are his friends like?"

The feckless Weasley and the migraine-inducing Granger. "Inseparable from him," he said, remembering the surprise (and pleasure) he'd felt whenever Granger, Weasley, and the boy had been at odds. As much as he disliked them, there had been something bizarre about seeing them knocked asunder. He wasn't the only one who thought so; during those times, the staff room had rung with gossip and speculation. Trelawney always predicted that one of them would be the death of the other two, which Severus, for his own reasons, had never found remotely funny.

"And you said many people love him?" Lily asked, immediately after Severus had finished fishing around for vaguely complimentary non-insults to offer about the boy's sidekicks.

"Yes." _Except when the papers vilify him._ A warm memory to cherish on his own, later. It would only upset Lily. "They call him the Boy Who Lived." _Because of you._ "The very government sings his praises from on high."

Lily blinked. "You're making that up."

"In fact, I'm not. I told you that he survived the Dark Lord's . . . attempt . . . " He couldn't call it anything more than that, or he'd risk her anguish returning. " . . . because you . . . protected him." Just as he couldn't say anything more, without risking his own sanity. Even the thought; the memory— "But for years, all anyone knew was that your son survived, and the Dark Lord did not. No one knew why, although Dumbledore had his theories—which turned out to be right," he muttered to himself.

Lily was watching him as though this was the most fascinating conversation she'd ever had. It might well be.

"So they thought he—defeated Voldemort, in a way?" she asked. She'd always been bright.

"Yes." _The boy hero._

Lily was silent a few moments. "But that's—that's not real love, is it? It's adoration, but—I mean, that's not all he's got, is it? He has people close to him? I know you said his friends, but what about—Sirius and Remus and Peter, for example?"

" _Pettigrew_?" Severus said, in such a tone that she jumped.

"Yes—Sev, what?" She looked alarmed. She half reached out for him. "What is—"

"Pettigrew was the reason the Dark Lord found you!" (She froze, then, her stretched-out fingers curling into her palm.) "He gave the Dark Lord your location, he was a fucking Death Eater, for Christ's sake, he was the traitor all the while you lot thought it was Lupin!"

He realized he'd gotten to his feet. Lily stared up at him, her eyes enormous, her face blank with shock, absolutely and utterly blank. Then the shock faded, and the look of anguish on her face was so much worse.

 _Could have broken that one to her better, arsehole_.

He sank back to the floor. She was shaking, just as she'd done last night, shaking all over. He fought the urge to touch her.

"Oh God," she whispered, sounding like her heart was breaking, and the sound made him feel as if someone were slowly prying his ribs apart. "Oh God. Why didn't I—it never—I didn't think—I thought maybe they'd taken him—I—" Her breath started to hitch; tears were pouring down her face. "No," she whispered, her face contorting, "no, no, no, no."

It wasn't denial; it was a wish.

He reached out to her, his hand shaking as badly as she was doing. Without a moment's hesitation she seized it. Perhaps she pulled herself to him, or perhaps he did it, but either way she was in his arms, weeping into his shoulder. Severus felt indescribably weary, and old, and at the same time, in the strangest way, perfectly joyous.

Lily eventually grew quiet, except for thick-sounding breaths. "You knew," she said, her voice as thick as her breathing. "About Peter." He tensed all over. Was she seriously suggesting— "But you didn't find out in time?"

"No," he said. His voice came out in a rasp. "We . . . did not know who all our . . . comrades were." The word was ash in his mouth. "All I knew was that someone close to you, specifically to you and—" He still couldn't say his name. "That there was a traitor close to you," he ended. "It wasn't until long after . . . "

He trailed off. The cold from the floorboards was making his legs stiff. "This floor is too bloody cold to sit on. Get up."

She did, her face blotchy and faintly bewildered. He grabbed a box of tissues and pushed it into her hands, then pointed to the bed without looking at it. "Sit there," he said gruffly, twisting his desk chair across the floor to face her.

"I thought you said that would . . . Sev, don't use magic!" she said, agitated, as he pointed his wand at the decrepit chair.

"The Ministry can only monitor houses, not individuals." He thought about attempting to make the sections fit together better, but then decided he didn't care. The chair groaned when he parked himself on it, but held up gamely.

"What! How long have you known that?"

"Since fourth year. I fail to see why it should matter to you," he said, finally noticing that Lily looked to be struggling with the urge to throttle him. "Your house is a Muggle dwelling; it would be monitored."

"I still feel like you could've managed it," she said grumpily, wiping at her face with a tissue. He hoped they weren't dusty. "I always thought they, I don't know, monitored wands . . . is that why you can do magic on the street and not get caught?"

"Yes. The Ministry is far too lazy to monitor every wand."

"I imagine it _would_ be a paperwork nightmare," she sighed. "So I can . . . " She pulled her wand out of her sleeve, gave him a half-timid, half-daring look that made his heart twist, and drew a series of small loops in the air. A handful of small, bell-shaped flames shone into existence, like a constellation brought to earth.

Severus wordlessly dumped a jar of colored pencils on his desk and passed the empty jar to her. The golden lights swirled inside with a nudge of her wand; she screwed the top on and set the glass on his dresser. The jar with its lights gave off a nimbus of warmth far greater than the strength of its glow.

"I hope it doesn't set the table on fire," he said, but he knew it wouldn't: Lily knew Charms the way he knew Potions, instinctively, even brilliantly. "I've never seen that before."

"I mostly worked on spell development during—you know," she said quietly. "I didn't—I didn't like the fighting. I could never—hurt anyone properly."

"Of course you couldn't," he said, feeling dim and faraway, as far away as a star would need to be to seem the same size as the little glowing flames in his pencil jar. "I'm guessing this was designed to keep the caster quite warm in a situation where their safety depended on passing unnoticed."

"Yes," Lily said, even more quietly than before.

"That's quite brilliant." He meant it, although his voice still sounded empty, like he was speaking through the world's longest telephone line.

"I'll take that compliment. It kept many people safe." She did not sound as if she were accusing him. He wondered if that would have made him feel grateful or vicious, had he not disconnected his emotions for the moment.

"Sev?" she asked. He finally looked away from the jar-stars to find her still watching them. The lights shone as pinpoints in her eyes. "Why do you think we're here? I mean . . . why do you think we've come back?"

"I don't know."

She looked at him, then. Her eyes in his dim bedroom, in the shabby yellow light from his desk lamp and the glow of her safety stars, were dark, as dark her son's had been in the poor lighting of the shack, when the night had been as deep as this one.

"But you've thought about it," she said. "I know you have. I know you—must have."

He wondered if she had been about to say _I know you_ and leave it at that. But that was only what he hoped. How well had she remembered him? She had spent the last two years of school ignoring him as if he'd ceased to exist, surrounding herself with people who were so vastly his opposite. He had driven himself into an anguished fury wondering if she was doing it on purpose, and what that purpose it was: to forget him? To show him? To make the point that she didn't need him, didn't miss him, didn't think about him at all?

He had always thought about her. Even when he had tried to cut her out of his heart—and he'd tried every day, for years after the death of their friendship—he had thought of her, he had remembered her, he had imagined what she must be like at the moment he was thinking of her. Even when his anguish of losing her had woven strands of hatred through his heart, everything had been about her. And when the storm of fury, the sudden, blazing hatred, had exhausted itself, he realized it had only been grief transformed. His heart and mind would feel like the dawn after a rainstorm: soaked, battered, but still there, ultimately unchanged, the sky and the earth remaining.

It had been a bitter lesson for him to learn that way; that when someone made a space for themselves in your heart, nothing could remove them entirely. Even through death, betrayal, abandonment, a part of them would remain, more eternal even than the stars.

"Sev?" She gently nudged her foot with his. "What are you thinking about?" He only stared at her, reeling himself back from those days, when he'd wished his heart would just give out and let him rest; bringing himself back to the present. "I can't tell anything that's going on with you when you go all blank like that. Is that the Occlu-thingy you told me about?"

"Yes." His lips felt dry. "I've thought about why _I_ am here, but I have no idea why you might be. Or," he said, "I have thought why I've come to this particular time, but as for the reason why I've come at all . . . "

"Nothing to go on for you either, huh?" she said quietly. "Well, what've you thought for you, then?"

"There is the fact that my trace will be lifted in two weeks, but somehow I don't think that's all of it."

"Since you're almost immune from getting caught, I wouldn't think so either. What's the other bit?"

He pointed his wand behind him at the wall calendar; it unhooked from its nail and drifted over. "You see the circled date." She nodded, catching it. "I don't know what that is for. It is something important, I'm certain, because I went to the trouble of circling it, but left no note."

Lily blinked. "Why does that mean it's important? I'd think it was the opposite, if you didn't write why."

"Because I expected myself to know. And I came back here." His gaze flicked around the room, not taking anything in but his own rising feeling of resigned loathing. "I would never have done that for anything unimportant. And I wouldn't have circled a date on my calendar for no good reason."

"Why _did_ you come back here?" Lily asked.

"I just told you I didn't know," he said, trying not to snap or say something crippling about her brains, which he would have done to anyone else.

"I mean—I'm sorry, Severus, but I just don't _get_ it. It's something so horribly important you came _home_ for Christmas, but you don't remember what it is, and you didn't make any notes? Wait, when did you wake up—back here?"

"Only hours before you saw me in that diner."

"Me too," she whispered. "We must've been right after each other. And . . . wait," she said again, blinking, "what were you doing before you got here?"

He stared at her, not sure if he should answer, or how. But his silence seemed to have been answer enough, because a haunted look bled across her face. "Oh God," she mumbled, the calendar slipping through her fingers. "You died, didn't you? You died."

He looked at her a moment longer, and then he gave the smallest of nods; barely more than a jerk of his head.

Lily started crying again. "I hate this," she whispered, and he couldn't help agreeing with her. She stood abruptly, starting to cry harder; but she was clenching her teeth, the area around her eyes full of anger, the helplessness he'd felt last night. "I hate this—"

When she took a sudden step forward, he thought she was about to storm out; but instead she only launched herself at him again, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face in his shoulder. He had a split second to catch her scent, the Muggle detergent and oranges and gardenias, feel the warmth of her—

And then the chair gave out beneath him and they both crashed to the floor in a rain of splintering plywood.

"Ah shit," Lily muttered, while Severus blinked up at the ceiling. He must have knocked his head, because he was seeing spots.

Lily's fingers tightened so hard in his jumper, he thought she meant to strangle him. He didn't understand why, until he heard a soft, deadly voice from some dim place above his head.

"I'll be faintly entertained to hear the explanation for this," said his mother. "Particularly after I thought you had grasped my explicit instructions, Severus."

 _Fucking wonderful,_ he thought, pushing Lily into a sitting position and following her upward.

His mother stood in the doorway, having silently pushed her way inside. Her wand was out. _Fuck_ , he added grimly. He wasn't naive enough to put it past his mother to hex both him and Lily out the door.

His mother had always retained the ability to make him feel about nine years old. Even when he had last seen her, only the summer before he died, he'd left her cousin's house shaking off the unpleasant sensation of being an errant, tiresome child. But it had followed him back to Hogwarts, up to the Headmaster's office, where Albus' understanding portrait-gaze had given him the other half of the feeling: the one of being a nine-year-old indulged by his grandfather, stuffed with sweets and told, "There, there, it will all work out."

"The chair broke," he said to his mother now, trying to Occlude himself out of the old feeling but having very little luck. The expression on his mother's face—only an echo around the eyes—was reminding him of parts of his childhood that always rose around him like mist during his darkest moments.

"And she flew to your rescue, I suppose? Attempting to save you from a nasty spill?" His mother turned the Look on Lily, but did not say anything to her.

Severus realized he had half-pushed Lily behind his shoulder. It wasn't that he was afraid his mother would do anything _objectively_ terrible to Lily, but she'd been born of a generation and class where punitive punishment was the only way to deal with misbehaving children. Pure-blood families like hers had a whole range of spells for that specific purpose. His mother had always started with the one that felt like a switch, but she'd rarely had to progress past that. As a child, the sensation of an invisible, whipping sting striking the backs of his hands was terrifying enough to make him behave. And to his mother, he and Lily were children until they reached majority; they were liable to punishment if they went contrary to her orders. The fact that Severus was within two weeks of his seventeenth birthday was a moot point, because _at that moment_ he was sixteen and still a child. Pure-bloods were very . . . clear-cut on certain matters.

"Something upsetting came up in the conversation," he said warily. His eyes were on her wand, even though they didn't want to be. It was out, but not pointing at them, but his mother could fire from the hip, so to speak. If she started the slow tap against her side . . .

"And it ended with her flinging herself on you?" his mother asked, her voice colder than the house, cold like the black ice on the street. Severus felt as if he were walking across a frozen lake, the way he'd watched the boy do last winter, following the starlight glow of Severus' patronus across the ice.

"The flinging was a result of the chair's shattering," Severus said, his eyes flicking from his mother's face to her wand. The Look was gone from her eyes, but the cold, calculating gaze in its stead was no more comforting. Behind him, Lily was as silent as death. Thank God; he didn't need her being a Gryffindor and getting herself switched.

His mother watched him coldly for a few moments, but she was not exerting any real effort to intimidate beyond what rose naturally with her ire. But her wand had started a slow tap . . . tap . . . tap against her hip, and he found himself unable to look away from it. This really was amazingly like being nine years and found sneaking into her Dark Arts books. " _Why have you done this, Severus? Why have you ignored my explicit instructions? Do you believe you have earned my indulgence? Answer me, Severus._ "

"I'll give you my indulgence this once," said his mother coldly. "And she will go, now, and she will not return. Anything inappropriate may be taken up under someone _else's_ roof, where they are fool enough to allow it."

"Thank you, Mother," he found himself saying, rather the way he'd thanked the Dark Lord for foisting something nasty on him.

When his mother pointed his wand at Lily, Severus barely managed not to go for his own; but thank God he restrained himself, or his mother would have laid into them like mad—

"Leave," she said to Lily, addressing her for the first time.

Lily didn't need to be told twice. Severus thought he felt the ghost of her touch on his back, but then she was across the room, pulling her coat down from the window where he'd hung it, turning to leave and then faltering when she saw his mother still standing in the doorway.

Lily's eyes flicked uncertainly to Severus. She used the awkward pause to pull on her coat.

"Remember what I told you, Severus," his mother said, now ignoring Lily as if she had already gone. "Pretty rich girls are interested in nothing less than pretty rich boys."

Severus blinked. Lily actually gasped. His mother's gaze rested on Lily for a moment, her faint, mocking smile wholly satisfied.

"Out," she said softly to Lily, pointing through the door with her wand.

Lily was frozen for a long, agonizing moment. Then she strode past his mother without looking at her, without acknowledging her. As Lily went past, his mother's eyes challenged him.

Severus didn't say anything. He needed to walk Lily home, he knew it; even on Christmas, he wasn't going to let her walk home alone—no, especially on Christmas, when his neighbors would be pissed, their spirits high—but he couldn't seem to move.

The phone jangled downstairs, and the mortification that had crystallized into silence broke apart enough to free him. He grabbed the jar of lights off his dresser and all but leapt down the stairs, just in time to find Lily fumbling with the door latch in the dark.

"Wait in the yard," he grit out, thrusting the jar of warmth into her hands, and snatched up the phone. "What?" he barked.

"Hello," said a remarkably calm male voice on the other end of the line. "This is Dr. Boone, I'm calling from St. Joseph's Hospital. May I speak with Mrs. Snape?"

"I'm her son, you can speak to me. St. Joseph's?" he repeated. His mother had never gone to a Muggle hospital; she'd have rotted to pieces first.

"I'm sorry, young man, but I need to speak with your mother. Can you get her for me?"

"My mother's indisposed." He turned at a movement, but it was only Lily, who'd drifted up to his elbow. The jar lit her face from below, her charmed lights glowing in patches high on her cheeks, in her eyes. "What's this abou . . . "

He went blank for a moment. Christmas, he realized, it was Christmas . . . it had happened at Christmas . . . he had forgotten the year. It was this year, apparently.

"My father," he heard himself say into the receiver, just barely managing not to say, _He's been hit by a car._ "This is about my father, isn't it?"

Lily's fingers dug into his elbow.

There was a long pause, and then Dr. Boone said, still in that calm voice, "Yes, son, it is. Can you ask your mother to return my call? As soon as possible."

"I'll see what I can manage," Severus said, and he hung up without another word.

He turned fully to face Lily and saw that his mother had come down the stairs and stopped at the little half-landing near the bottom.

"What did the Muggle want?" she asked, sounding almost tranquil.

"Tobias has been hit by a car." Severus was quoting from memory. He found his mind flickering through it, like he was watching an old Muggle movie reel . . . he pictured his father leaving his mate's party and crossing the road, maybe stumbling a little, but definitely not seeing the car. . . it hadn't been able to stop on the ice . . . Over time, the unimportant details, such as how old he'd been when it happened, had faded from Severus' mind.

He suddenly remembered he had answered the phone that time, too. Maybe the conversation had gone just the same way.

Lily made a small, helpless-sounding noise, her grip almost painful now. His mother said nothing, only watched him with a calm, complete gravity, the sort that came from the deepest wellspring of Occlumency.

"He's dead?" she asked, her voice like water running.

"Yes," he said.

* * *

 

Lily had to tell them where St. Joseph's was. His mother took his arm like they were going for a stroll, which they had never done, and he Apparated them to a back alley across the street. Lily popped into sight a second later, her jaw set, her pale face haunted but resolute. His mother did not even seem to notice Lily was there. She did not seem to notice anything. She simply followed him and Lily as they stepped onto the gleaming white bars of the crosswalk and made their way across the street.

"Not that way," Lily said as Severus headed toward the front doors, or what he'd assumed were the front doors. He hadn't been to a Muggle hospital . . . probably since this moment the first time around.

She put her hand on his elbow. "You said he was hit by a car? Then the A&E would have picked him up, we need to go there."

Making sure his mother was with them, he followed Lily around to the side of the rectangular building, where a concrete overhang was stamped with the painted words ACCIDENT & EMERGENCY. A pair of Muggle vehicles—ambulances, he recalled—hung open, Muggles in uniforms scrambling in and out, the red lights flashing but no sirens sounding.

"What was the doctor's name?" Lily asked.

"Boone," he said, watching his mother. Another pair of uniformed Muggles ran past, pushing an empty stretcher with a clatter; at the back of an ambulance they stopped, folded it up with practiced alacrity, and lifted it through the gaping doors.

Lily was up the concrete steps first, striding through the glass-fronted sliding doors into the A&E. For a moment Severus lost sight of her in the press of people; the place was a madhouse, and a woman at his elbow was going hysterical. A Muggle healer, or at least an attendant, whatever they were fucking called, came up and took her away. A man holding a screaming toddler, its foot wrapped in a bloody towel, stepped between Severus and Lily and almost got one of Severus' hexes upside the head.

Severus felt his Occlumency shields cracking under the strain of frenzied emotion. He took his mother by the arm and steered her to the wall.

"Wait here," he said. She was silently facing forward, looking at nothing. It was as if she was sleepwalking. But she nodded at the sound of his voice, and he had to take that as good enough.

He shoved his way through a knot of arguing Muggles, his eyes sweeping the maddened crowd for the tangle of Lily's dark red hair—and there she was; she'd fought her way to the reception desk and was leaning over it to speak, or maybe shout, to the Muggle in the white uniform behind it. The Muggle pointed across the room, using her whole arm, the other hand on a telephone held up to her ear.

Lily turned away from the desk, squeezing past the man with the howling toddler; Severus grabbed Lily by the arm and hauled her free of the mob, almost knocking them into an attendant pushing a tray with boxy Muggle equipment piled on it. She veered around them without blinking, thrusting her way past a mint-colored curtain, shadows moving restlessly behind it.

Lily leaned into him to be heard over the noise, her damp hair tickling his collarbone. "She said we can find Dr. Boone that way," she told him, pointing the same way the Muggle woman had.

They found his mother where he'd left her, standing still, watching a little girl sob into her grandmother's shoulder, her expression one of amputated interest. He took his mother by his arm and steered her after Lily, who seemed to know how this went.

He remembered then that her father had died in the summer. Cardiac arrest. It ran in the family. She had told him that long before her father died, because when her father _had_ died, she hadn't been speaking to him. She hadn't even broken her pact with her anger to tell him. But he'd seen her in the black dress; he'd watched the funeral home from a distance, the loaded hearse and the Cadillac limo she had stepped into with her mother and sister. Petunia had been weeping so hard he had been able to hear it faintly from across the street. Her mother had looked as if grief had taken her somewhere so deep inside herself, a part of her had gone with it. Lily had simply cried with her eyes wide open, not even bothering to wipe her face.

Had she been forced to come here, to fight her way past screaming Muggles to get to her father? Had she been confronted with his corpse at the other end, or had she arrived when there was still some hope he would live, only to have it taken away moments later?

He shouldn't have let her come with. It had been selfish. Cruelly so. He wasn't even going to miss his father. It had been a blessing when he died the first time; it would be this time, too. His father's life had been miserable.

Like his own. He'd thought it was going to be a blessing when he died.

It figured his own hell was filled with manic Muggles, his mother's slowly tapping wand, and a Lily who loved James Potter and wanted him to tell her of her son.

* * *

 

Severus held one of those funny Muggle biros and stared at the paper with its cramped black boxes. The nurse had given the thing to him to fill out. He balanced the clipboard on the stack of pamphlets on his knees. Some woman called a "bereavement counselor" had pushed them into his arms, speaking in a low, soothing voice of arrangements.

"Do you need help?" Lily whispered. She was sitting next to him on those hideously uncomfortable plastic chairs Muggles thought should staff the needs of government agencies, her shoulder pressed against his and her jiggling knee wiggling his arm. He repressed the urge to put his hand on her knee and make her stop.

"I don't remember any of this information," he muttered. "I don't even remember his fucking middle name."

As one, they both looked across the short hall at his mother. She sat in the chairs facing them, her eyes turned on the insipid painting above their heads. Severus thought she looked like a madwoman, especially since she had left the house wearing a witch's gown. At least when he explained to the Muggles why this informational paper was empty of anything useful, they wouldn't be too surprised.

"Well, just fill in what you do remember and sign off on it," Lily said. "Do you have his birth certificate filed away at home? We can always bring it tomorrow."

"You should go home," he said, not looking at her as he scrawled his father's first and last name and his address into the narrow boxes. "You shouldn't be here." He felt her go stiff, and hated himself for being so much shit at this sort of thing. "I mean you shouldn't have to be. This is depressing as fuck."

It was nice being able to swear properly again, not having to worry about impressionable ears. "Cobwebs and broomsticks" was just _not_ the same.

"It _is_ pretty bad," Lily admitted. She moved her head like she was about to put it on his shoulder, but when she didn't, he knew he was just pathetic. "I've been trying to think if this has all been as bad as—you know—that night when— but I think it's the same amount of bad, just drawn out on a lower scale for a really fucking long time."

"It makes perfect sense for me to suffer in extremity," Severus said, now writing down his father's next of kin. He wished he knew how to get in contact with his father's first wife; she would have been better at this. "But not you."

She was silent for a few moments. "It doesn't make sense for you to suffer," she said at last, very quietly. "Especially not . . . not like this."

"His death was a release from a life he hated." He forged his mother's signature on the proper line. Lily's hand sneaked into his line of sight and folded ever-so-gently over his.

"His?" she asked, her voice even quieter than before. "Or yours?"

He held still. Her hands were cold.

"So many people have died, Sev," she whispered. A doctor and nurse walked past them, talking in low voices; a phone trilled in the depths of the softly lit, off-white corridors, and a stretcher clacked out of sight. "So many people have died, and I'm so tired—I thought when I died, I wouldn't have to worry about who was next, at least, but that was wrong, I was wrong. I just . . . I just want it to _stop_ , don't you?"

"Of course I want it to stop." His voice matched the pitch of hers. That weariness from last night returned; but it had never really left. It had sunk into his bones, even these young ones, because it was part of his soul; it could only rise and sink.

"Then you know what we have to do." Her grip was not so gentle on his hand anymore, but it was not painful, as it had been at the foot of the stairs, when he'd held the phone in his hand. "You know who's caused it. You know who we have to stop if—if we want it to stop."

He finally looked up at her. He had half expected her to be crying, but her eyes were clear and hard and dry. Like her grip.

God, he was tired of stopping Voldemort. He didn't want to do it again. He wanted to take this hard-earned second chance and move somewhere with sunlight and an ocean, no Dark Lord or Dark Marks, no Lily smiling at James Potter and thinking of a baby who'd grown up without her. No more schemes, no more long walks with death. Just . . . life. The normal kind he once would have scorned, until he realized the possibility of his ever having it was so insignificant, he could never even wish hard enough.

He had always wanted what he couldn't have. If he ever got what he wanted, he wasn't sure he'd know what to do with it.

He would probably find it was nothing like he had thought it would be, anyway.

"We can do this," she said, in a voice as clear and hard as her gaze. "We can."

All he could think was: _Hopefully not the same way twice._ Because the other time around, stopping Voldemort had led to them being right here, once dead.

And then he knew why he'd circled that date on his calendar.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything from Eileen's backstory that is not corroborated by extra-canon material was made up by me. If Pottermore has jossed any of it, so be it.

_Boxing Day, December 26, 1976_

Lily jabbed her elbow into someone's back, her knee between two people's hips, and shoved through the gap that opened up. Her prize was almost torn out of her grip when it caught on some woman's handbag, but she twisted free without tearing it, darted around an overflowing shopping cart, and slipped ahead of a pair of quarreling girls into the checkout queue.

"Just what you need to take your mind off the most depressing Christmas in the history of time," she said under her breath, clutching the jumper to her chest.

Boxing Day sales. She'd been so wound up last Christmas, what with trying to keep Sirius from burning her house down as he tried to distract James from mournful thoughts, and trying to distract James alongside him, and being a brand new mum with a brand new baby, and bearing out the war as it grew darker, that she hadn't gone to a single sale. When really, she should have gone to all of them, because there was something therapeutic about kicking and elbowing perfect strangers, and snarling at them, and being _expected_ to shove _everything_. She hadn't even needed stinging hexes to get people's paws off her things. That would've been the easy way out, anyway. She _wanted_ this to be tough. Snarling over marked-down cashmere meant not having to think. It was rather fun, in a nasty sort of way.

She hauled cash out of her billfold, wondering whether Sev would let loose at one of these things or go so stiff she'd have to prop him on a dolly to get him out the door. She thought Sev would appreciate the chance to unleash on someone . . . but really, he would probably just get a Leglimency migraine from all the emotions running manic through the air and collapse. Lily didn't want another trip to the hospital.

Besides, if she'd brought him, he'd have pitched a fit at her buying him a jumper. And a coat. Somehow she didn't think grown-up Sev was going to be any less difficult about "hand-outs."

Well, grown-up Lily knew how to be difficult, too. Severus was going to get some clothes that _fit_. He could wear them or toss them in the river, but he was going to get them. And if he knew what was good for him, he'd take the wear-them option.

She sent a death glare at an old lady trying to shove her shopping cart into Lily's ribs in order to winch her out of the line, and squeezed forward through the gap. She'd forgotten the lovely thinness of being sixteen.

Five minutes later, Lily stumbled out of the crowd, down the aisle toward the exit, her treasure bag in hand. It seemed safer to clutch it across her chest, so she did, going out the sliding doors into the car park and the cold. The sun had timidly decided to come out that morning, although it was spending long periods of time hiding behind the clouds. It was acting like Sev had the one time Lily had dragged him to a Slug Club party. But the clouds were thin and blowing away in streaks, leaving the sky patched with wintry blue. Lily had bought a cashmere cardigan for herself in that shade.

The inside of the store had been so hot, she was glad she had worn layers that could be stripped away. Her coat and cardigan hung open, and a brisk chill was now threading past the weave of her thin blouse. It felt lovely. She bet her cheeks were bright red.

She stood for a moment on the edge of the car park, closed her eyes and just breathed. The air smelled only faintly of exhaust, not of mist tinted by fear; dementor mist. She could walk anywhere she wished, go anywhere she wanted, because she didn't have to worry about the Dark Lord finding her, or any Death Eaters in their stupid, frightening masks. All that was in the past; the future.

She took the route home past the bakery, stopping to get herself an iced bun to eat. How long had it been since she could just do that? She couldn't even remember. Iced buns had been a thing of the past, until the past became the present, the present the future.

She got Severus a petit-four, hoping he still liked them, and checked her watch. Just enough time to get to the park.

She had all but ordered Severus to meet her there at noon. He had given her a look she couldn't read—some strange combination of bone-deep weariness, irony, and dim amusement—and said, "As you wish."

Lily had a Plan. She wasn't going to set foot in that house again with his horrible mother; she had a very strong idea that her husband's death wouldn't make Mrs. Snape forget she had forbidden Lily to darken her doorstep if they each lived to be two hundred. She and Sev weren't about to continue meeting all holiday in the frozen play park. The only other option was to gain Severus' entrance to her house, and she was fairly confident she could do this. It would require a certain sickening playing off his father's death, but she could stomach that if the alternative was Sev alone with that woman in that dark, cheerless, drafty house.

 _I can't believe Sev grew up with that woman_ , she thought, sucking a bit of icing off her finger. _She's the vilest person I've ever met. Voldemort could've recruited her to keep the Death Eaters in line. I bet he was a lark to Sev, after growing up with her for a mum._

She hadn't missed Severus' tension, or the way he'd pushed her behind him. His breathing had hitched when his mother started tapping her wand against her hip.

Severus had never once told her his mother was like that. Oh, Lily had met her at the train station every year and been absolutely ignored, but she'd thought that was just the way Mrs. Snape was to strangers in public. But in private she was _worse_. She was literally as bad as Death Eaters, and all she had to do was stand there and tap her wand. Forget masks; if she'd shown up on the battlefield in that lilac robe, wand out, the Order would have fled from her like a pack of frightened squirrels, Lily in the lead.

All Severus had ever told her was his mother came from a pure-blood family, the Princes. Lily had looked them up once out of curiosity, in a book the Hogwarts library kept called _Annals of Magickal Families._ The Princes had an entry lengthier than she would have expected—it was just _odd_ somehow, to think of awkward, moody Sev as part of a distinguished pure-blood family going back to the Reformation—but most of it meant nothing to Lily; she figured you had to be a pure-blood to understand it. The only reference she recognized was the Prince family's long-standing allegiance to Slytherin and blood-purity. But the last line had stood out to her: _The most recent descendants of this line are daughter Eileen, by Prospero's first marriage to Emily Marlowe, and sons Duncan and Eleazar, by his second wife, Flavia Black. Prospero recognizes no grandchildren to this date._

All very stuffy and proper. And then Eileen Prince had married a Muggle and wound down her days on a poverty-stricken street in a North England mill town. How on earth had _that_ happened? That terrifying woman, in the robe with the embroidery that made Lily's fingers ache, it was so intricate, her eyes cold and cruel as she looked at her _son_ . . .

Lily could never imagine looking at her baby like that. She just couldn't.

She climbed the stairs to the play park. A couple of children were there this time, bundled so thickly in coats they looked like puffer fish. Their mothers stood chatting with their arms tucked tight across their chests, stamping their feet to keep warm. "Five more minutes!" one of them shouted at the babies, and her friend said, "Oh, make it two, I'm freezing to death out here."

 _Great_ , Lily thought, watching one of the children try to haul itself onto a swing. _Just what I need a reminder of. Don't cry out here, your tears will turn to icicles._

But the feelings of longing, of grief, beat at the inside of her heart like a thousand birds straining to get free. In those unoccupied moments in her mum's house, she'd found herself hating Petunia for keeping everything so clean—how she would have _loved_ to be able to take a scrub brush and a bucket and savage all the kitchen tiles free of grout—something, anything, to take her mind off a house barren of her baby's laughter—

"If I'd thought anyone would be daft enough to take their spawn out in this weather, I'd have suggested another meeting place."

Lily felt her frozen cheeks ache as she smiled in spite of everything. She turned to Sev. As usual, he was hunching, although this time he could blame it on the cold. His coat was a disgrace to coats everywhere. She knew he'd had to get it from the second-hand shop and done the best he could, but it couldn't keep him warm.

His eyes were on the children, but everything about him said "wary lest they come this way."

"You weren't waiting for me, were you?" she asked, glancing at her watch to be sure. Her voice shook. Shit.

"It's of no consequence," he said quietly, his dark eyes skating over her face and then away, squinting in the sunlight. "I was early."

He followed her away from the park, down the concrete steps to her street. She had no idea if she should ask—if he would want her to—but she said, "How's . . . how's your mum?"

"Making arrangements. She's even put on black. For a moment, I thought she must have run out of clothes to wear and stolen one of my school robes while the laundry washed."

"Well, he was her husband," Lily said, but timidly, because she couldn't believe that woman could love anyone. And then it occurred to her that she was a widow, too—but no—she wasn't—she _wasn't_ , because James was here, somewhere, still alive somewhere, and Tobias Snape was really, completely gone.

James was—

"...more to do with tradition," Sev was saying as she wrenched her attention back to him. "She was raised to act a certain way at certain times. Her husband has died; she must observe the tradition of mourning." Severus wasn't looking at Lily, but off to the side, as if this conversation was hardly interesting. But his voice was empty. She remembered when he'd taught her about Occlumency theories, so excited he'd been to learn it, because it would mean he could stop dropping into people's heads, could distance himself from unhappiness.

Lily wondered if you really could do that. It seemed more like unhappiness would just wait until you could notice it again.

A sudden unnerving thought assailed her. "You're not going to move, are you?"

"My mother will move in with a cousin of hers who's mentally unwell."

"Are you—are you going with her?"

"No. She'll leave the house with me." He stopped walking, so she stopped with him.

"What?" she asked, looking at his face, then up and down the empty street.

"I doubt your mother wants to see you walking with me. If you're going home—"

"Eventually." She set the shopping bag down on the ground and pulled the jumper out of it. "This is for you," she said, shoving it at his chest in the hopes that he'd take it out of reflex. He just looked down at it, infuriating boy—man.

"I'm quite sure I'm not going to take that," he said.

"Come on, Sev! That one I bought you last year doesn't fit anymore. This is a replacement." When he just narrowed his eyes at her, she said, "I'm not taking it back, whatever you do. But I guess if you won't take it, I can wear it around the house, sighing that it's yours and it's all I have left of you—did you know Mum still thinks you got me sprogged up and I lost the baby?"

An interesting range of emotion's flitted across Severus' face, some so subtle Lily didn't know what they were. The most prominent was horror. "If you weren't such a wretched liar," he said vehemently, but he let her push the jumper into his arms.

Lily smiled sweetly at him, but he might have missed it, because he was giving the jumper a vicious scowl. "It's black, I thought you'd like it."

"I hate colors," he muttered, which confirmed that he did like it.

"Good," she said, trying for cheerful. "And I got it on sale, so don't go fretting that it cost my life's savings or anything. Hurry up, put it on, you look like an ice lolly."

"If I remove my coat to put this on, I will be colder," he pointed out; just to be difficult, she was certain.

"For two seconds, you big baby. Go on!"

He did, but in a very put-upon manner. She couldn't believe he was wearing nothing but a thermal shirt under his too-thin coat, but she managed not to say anything about it, mostly because she needed the time to figure out a way to broach the coat . . .

And Sev's thermal was too short, too, because it rode up as he raised his arms to slip on the jumper. She found her gaze lingering on the trail of hair on his stomach, and then wrenched her eyes away, feeling like a bit of a great pervert, because Severus looked sixteen. Well, seventeen almost, but that was splitting hairs—oh no, she shouldn't think of hairs. She was twenty-one inside, even if she _looked_ sixteen and Sev was really thirty-eight.

She frowned slightly. She must seem really immature to him . . . if he'd lived seventeen more years than she had, he must have had a ton of experiences that she hadn't . . .

She made herself focus. "Good," she said, looking him over as he tugged the sleeves down past his wrists, "it fits. I had to eyeball it—glad to know I've got _one_ skill to market in my bright new future."

Severus was giving her a closed-off, unreadable look that Lily couldn't connect to anything she'd just said. Did he think she was being flippant? Flippant had always been a difficult thing to practice around Sev, and a grown-up Sev . . .

Oh, Lord, if she started second-guessing every one of his reactions, she would drive herself to drink. Severus had been hard to figure out when she'd been close to him, and he'd had twenty-two years apart from her to turn into a whole other person.

"Thank you," he said, with as much gravity as if she'd just given him her firstborn child. Although his expression at being handed a baby—especially her actual firstborn, Harry—would probably have been a lot more horrified. She wondered what he'd been like around Harry. Last night, everything he had told her about Harry had been wiped free of emotion.

"You're welcome," she said, smiling. Was there anyone else in the world who gave him things? _You are one of only two people who has honestly liked me . . . most people loathe me . . ._

"Lily," he said, in a voice remarkably like patience. "Whatever you want to ask me, you may ask me."

"What?" she said, blinking.

"If I were to say 'your face is an open book,' it would be an understatement. A closer comparison would be sky-writing. What is it?"

"I don't want to _ask_ anything—" His look was openly sardonic. "Okay, I do, so stop looking so sarcastic—it's not that I—oh, sod it, I bought you a coat! Don't freak."

Severus blinked and then peered down into the bag where she was pointing. "Very considerate. I hope you shoplifted it, because there is no way I am taking a coat you paid for."

"No shoplifting, but I did cosh an old lady and steal it out of her cart in the car park."

"If that were true, I'd take it. Even if you'd stolen it off the back of a Death Eater. But there's no reason for you to—"

"There _is_ , Sev, because you don't take care of yourself and you never have."

His face had gone cold and remote. "I've taken care of myself for a great many years," he said. His tone made her feel small and wretched.

"I know," she said quietly. "Which is why you should let me help."

He folded his arms tight across his chest, as if trapping his ratty old coat against himself in preparation for her diving at him and stripping it off. A militant sort of stubbornness had stolen onto his face. Inwardly, Lily sighed, but she was glad to see it all the same: pig-headed, abrasive Severus was better than empty Severus, or cold and biting Severus. Even though they were all a part of Severus . . .

"From a logical standpoint," he said in a voice that sounded distinctly snitty, "it's irrational for me to accept a coat that I will hardly wear. This is the first time since I was ten that I've been at home when it was cold, and at Hogwarts I have always worn robes."

"Right, and until then you're here, and you're going to bloody freeze before December 31st rolls around and you do whatever it is you can't remember you came back to do. I'm _not_ returning it, Severus. We can fight about it until you wear it, or you can wear it and save us the fight."

"Wear it yourself," he said, sounding, for a moment, very much sixteen years old.

"I can't, you great git, it won't fit me."

He nicked it from the bag, holding it up to her. "It will."

"It's obviously a man's coat, Sev."

"Women are permitted to wear men's clothing. It's only the reverse that's a problem." She took note of the way he carefully folded it up before tucking it back into the bag. "I prefer the fight to the coat, thank you."

Lily growled. He did not look perturbed. Damn him! James had always balked when she growled.

"Fine! You'll get a fight," she warned, picking up the bag. Severus only looked politely interested. Git! She would _not_ laugh. "Come on, it's lunch time." She grabbed him and tried to pull him toward her house, but he must have had steel beams installed in his legs because he didn't move a centimetre.

"Are you seriously suggesting I go eat at your house? That old woman must have coshed _you_." But he didn't pull his arm away. She could feel his tension through the layers of his clothes, could see him making a fist in his coat pocket. She wouldn't have thought the prospect of eating with her family would unnerve him so much. He had seemed to take everything in stride on Christmas Eve . . .

_Seemed to, Lily. You're talking about a man who can shut off his emotions at will. You idiot. No one says "Everyone loathes me" and doesn't care._

"I have a cunning plan," she assured him. His expression was hilariously skeptical. She figured she should be offended, but she couldn't be.

"I hope it's more cunning than your plan to floss with stringweed," he said.

"Trust you to remember that," she muttered. "Roadkill is more cunning than that plan. This plan is cunning like a fox, a very energetic and crafty one. It's very . . . Slytherin-y."

"Our house symbol is the snake, not the fox."

"Well, maybe you should consider changing it, then. Snakes have a bad rep, poor little things."

"Foxes don't have one much better," he said dryly. "What is this plan you—misguidedly, I am sure—believe is cunning?"

"Don't get angry with me, okay?" she said, as a sudden worry struck her that she was being very naïve about everything to do with Sev. He couldn't be as . . . blasé about his father's death as he'd led her to believe, could he? "I just thought . . . since, you know, so much bad stuff is going on . . . " She took a deep breath, willing herself not to be a coward and squeeze her eyes shut for this part. "If we told my mum your dad's died, I'm sure she'll let you come over."

There was a silence. A long, very silent one. Lily realized she was squinting her eyes and forced them all the way open. Then she forced them to look up at him. But he didn't look disgusted or furious; on the contrary, his expression was rather . . . measuring. A long, measuring look.

"That is fairly Slytherin," he said, his voice neutral again. Lily saw that at some point she had slid her hand down to grab his.

"You can tell me it's dumb as roadkill," she sighed. "It's not actually any good, is it? I just thought—"

"From an objective standpoint, it has a plausible chance of working. You would know your mother better than I to judge its effect subjectively."

Severus had really learned how to talk like a Victorian Potions textbook.

"I think it'll work. I haven't told her yet why I was out so late—she was pretty mad at me about that, but I think—if she knows—it will . . . make things better."

"You mean she won't scream and attack me if I come in the front door," he said with a dark shrewdness, and more accuracy than Lily liked. She felt herself blushing. He flicked his head to the side, as though shaking it 'no.' "For many years I have been a Death Eater. I have spent a great deal of effort learning how to . . . unsettle."

And Lily would just bet he didn't have to look much further than his own sitting-room for inspiration. "Will you come, then?"

He answered, but at the same moment she sneezed and didn't hear, because the power of her sneeze had just blown her ears off the sides of her head.

A snowy white handkerchief fluttered in front of her. She groped it into her hand and blew her nose.

"Was that a flock of geese flying overhead?" Severus asked.

"Oh, shut it," she sniffled, wiping at her eyes, which had teared up. "I didn't know you carried handkerchiefs."

"I don't."

"You conjured it?" She was impressed; if she hadn't know better, she'd have thought it came from Harrod's. The fine white lawn looked like it belonged in the suit pocket of a bank manager. She stuffed it into her pocket, thinking that conjured or not, it was worth keeping.

"What was it you said when I was sneezing, blasting off my own ears and not hearing you?"

"I said if your mother calls the Muggle police, I can at least dive out the window and Apparate."

* * *

Her cunning plan to finagle Severus into her mother's good graces hit its first snag when they walked in the front door and Petunia screamed, " _Why have you brought that dreadful boy back here!_ " and Lily yelled back, " _His father's just died, you heartless cow, why don't you think of someone except yourself for once!_ "

Of course, Russians probably heard them in Moscow, so naturally Mum did, too. Especially since she had been coming down the stairs when the front door opened. She delivered a brief soliloquy on the importance of manners in front of guests, and then looked at Severus, who was standing againgst the door with the air of a man expecting to be thrown out on his ear. Another long, very silent silence ensued.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Severus," Mum said at last in a very quiet voice.

"He's in a better place," Severus said. Lily wondered if she was the only one who heard the touch of bitterness in his voice.

Petunia was as happy as a wet cat with brambles in its tail at the prospect of Severus' staying for lunch, and shut herself up in the kitchen. While the scent of onion soup threaded its way through the house, Mum, Lily and Sev sat in the sitting-room making excruciating conversation. Severus was perfectly polite and monosyllabic, Mum grave and distant in her compassion, and Lily full of the jitters. She couldn't stop jiggling her leg. Also, that sneeze had really knocked her up; she kept pulling Severus' handkerchief out of her pocket to wipe her nose.

When they sat down to table for soup and bread, Petunia parked herself at the furthest end and opposite side from Severus, and Mum sat with her eldest daughter. Lily hoped it was just from solidarity.

There wasn't a lot of talking, just the chink of their silverware on ceramic. Lily was just glad there wasn't any more screaming. Yet.

The violent urge to sneeze gave her a split second's warning, just enough time to grab her napkin and thrust her face into it. That time, when she came up for air, she felt dizzy. "Eurgh," she said.

"Goodness," Mum said. "Are you all right, dear?"

"I think so," Lily said thickly, although she wasn't so sure. She blew her nose into her napkin, but her sinuses seemed to have suddenly developed an unlimited supply of mucus. "Oh, damn."

"You've caught a cold," Severus told her in no uncertain terms, "from running around in the sleet without an umbrella or even a hat—who is it who can't take care of themselves?"

"Oh, shut it, I bet you'll be coming up with a flu next— your coat wouldn't keep a church mouse warm." She sneezed again, into her soup. Great. At least they were her own germs.

"I bet running around in a sea of manic shoppers first thing in the morning didn't help matters any," Severus persisted, the ruthless bastard. "Your eyes are turning red. Stop sneezing in your soup and go to bed."

She wondered if he used that tone to tell students to cut up their shivelfigs.

She squinted up the table at Mum and Petunia and found them giving her and Severus very . . . strange looks. Lily couldn't interpret them with a head stuffed full of mucus.

"Severus is right, sweetheart," Mum said gently, pushing herself up from the table. "Come on—let's put you into your pajamas and we'll see how you feel after a rest."

Lily went. Petunia and Sev watched her go.

"I shouldn't have let you out last night." Mum clattered around the bedroom, rustling up Lily's nightgown and a clean pair of socks. "But then I suppose you wouldn't have been there for Severus, and maybe it's good you were."

"Oh, you have no idea, his mum is the most wretched horror," Lily muttered, and then darted a terrified look at the door. It would be just her luck if Sev were standing there—

But he wasn't, and he wouldn't be; sixteen-year-old Severus might have been clueless enough to show up when she was in the midst of changing, but grown-up Severus would know to stay put. Even if it was with Petunia.

Mum paused in turning down Lily's bed, but after a moment she resumed. "There you are, sweetie," she said, folding Lily, now in her pajamas, into bed. "Rest is the best medicine."

"Thought that was laughter," Lily murmured.

In which case, it was unsurprising she was sick . . . there had been precious little of that for a very long time.

"Oh—Mum?" Her mother looked a question as she placed the box of tissues on Lily's bedside table. "Can you make sure that stubborn old sod doesn't leave without his coat?" She pointed in the general direction of the bag she'd dumped upstairs when she was certain her mum wouldn't eject Severus from the house when her daughter's back was turned. "I got it for him because his is about to fall apart in a good breeze, but he's too much of a git to take it without a fight, and now my head's too swollen to bully him properly."

She closed her eyes, because they felt itchy. Mum was silent for so long she almost opened them to see if her mother had left the room, but then Mum only said, in a soft, gentle voice, "Of course, sweetheart." Lily felt her mother's lips on her forehead, was folded for a moment into the embrace of her perfume; and then there was only the rustle of her leaving, taking a paper shopping bag with her.

* * *

When Lily opened her eyes, it was to a mostly dark room. Some time after she'd fallen asleep, the daylight had faded, and a frog had crawled into her open mouth, slid down her throat and got lodged there. Someone had also packed tissues into her ears.

She gave an experimental groan. When was the last time she'd been sick . . . ? She'd forgot how lousy it made you feel. Still, this wasn't quite as bad as the time the Sirius' Indian take-away had given her food poisoning and Harry had screamed all night because none of the boys knew how to quieten him down. The memory made her want to cry and laugh at the same time.

Someone rapped smartly on the door and pushed inside without waiting for an answer. Lily squinted through the semi-darkness, the fading sun that scrawled across the wall in tones of gold. "Petunia?" she croaked.

"Mummy thought you should have a tray," Petunia's brisk voice said, speaking from a blurry dark shape. She set something on Lily's desk with a _clink_ and clicked on the lamp there, blotting the room with matte, yellow light.

"What time is it?" Lily asked, pushing herself up to sit. Her voice was weary and croaky. She wasn't hungry, but she was old enough to know she needed to eat whatever Petunia had brought anyway. A bowl with lifting curls of steam suggested soup.

"A little past three in the afternoon. You've been asleep for about two and a half hours, but that's long enough if you want to get a good sleep tonight."

Petunia arranged the tray on Lily's knees with efficient, almost fussy movements. Lily blinked down at a queenly spread: Petunia had laid out the meal on a place-mat and the spoon on a snowy napkin. The tea was exactly the right shade of light, milky brown, because Lily always took more milk than tea.

"This is amazing," she told Petunia. She chose the glass of orange juice first, drinking half of it down her aching throat.

"It's simplistic," Petunia said, dismissive, but Lily recognized signs of satisfaction in her sister's face.

"I couldn't make a tray like this," Lily said.

"I don't imagine this is what they teach at . . . that place." Petunia's nostrils flared and her mouth thinned.

At the reminder of Hogwarts, Lily expected her to turn on her heel and stalk out, but to her utter shock Petunia swiveled out her desk chair and sat in it.

Deciding the best course of action was to eat her soup in silence, Lily did just that. Petunia had made her chicken broth. She wondered if it was specially for her. As unlikely as it was that Petunia would practice consideration on her freaky sister, she wouldn't serve broth for dinner. Perhaps she'd cooked a chicken and this was the run-off.

"Where's Mum?" Lily asked, and then winced, hoping Petunia wouldn't take that as an insult.

"I told Mummy to stay downstairs. You might not know," said Petunia in the voice of one expecting Lily to be far too self-absorbed to notice, "but Mummy has been feeling quite tired lately. I don't want her catching whatever you picked up."

"No" was all Lily said.

For that matter, she felt too tired to continue dipping her spoon over and over, so she set it down, picked up the bowl and drank directly from it. Petunia looked faintly scandalized.

 _Hell with it_ , Lily thought. She was too tired to tread lightly on civility; she would ask what she really wanted to know. "Did Mum get Severus to take the coat?"

"She did," Petunia said coldly. Lily was glad she could hide her eye-roll behind the soup bowl.

When the mention of Severus still didn't drive Petunia to get up and leave, Lily wondered why on earth not. She wasn't trying to aggravate Petunia, but since she was nine it seemed to be a talent she'd developed overnight, as if it had blossomed along with her magic. Nothing she did or said was ever right, and Petunia knew that, so why did she remain in Lily's desk chair, her legs primly crossed, her long, thin arms folded across her lap?

"Lily." Petunia's tone of voice actually made Lily look up, it was so . . . unusual. Not angry, or smug, or snide, just quiet and serious. Then she said, "How long have you been . . . dating that boy?"

Lily blinked once, then three more times. "Dating . . . who, _Sev_?"

"Yes, _him_ ," Petunia snapped, her seriousness evaporating. "I didn't know you made it a habit of running around dating multiple men. Is that standard practice at that freaky place?"

"No, it's not, and no, I don't," Lily said, pushing James out of her mind. _Not now, I can't deal with that right now._ "But Tuney"—the name just slipped out, as 'Sev' had on Christmas Eve—"I'm not dating Severus. Why would you think—"

"Fine." Petunia practically bit the word in half. "If you want to pretend everyone but you is a complete idiot, I'm sure that's fine with me." She snatched the tray off Lily's lap, but paused to slam the juice glass and teacup onto Lily's bedside table.

"Drink your fluids," she snarled. When the bedroom door slammed shut behind her, Lily flinched.

"What the hell," she muttered, putting a hand to her head. It throbbed a little, as if trying to get her attention.

She slumped against her pillows and rolled that bizarre episode around in her mind as she finished off her juice. Honestly, just because you hung around with a boy, people assumed you fancied each other. All right, so she and Sev had hung around together all the time (before last summer), but still . . .

No one had ever believed her when she said he wasn't her boyfriend. Lily had always suspected their skepticism came from sincerely thinking boys and girls couldn't ever be just _friends_. But she and Sev had honestly been friends, for ages. They liked the same sorts of things (before all that with the Death Eaters and Dark magic), like Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek and the Lone Ranger. She'd gone to see _Indiana Jones_ with Remus, but the guilty thought had flitted across her mind that she wished she could've seen it with Sev; she knew he'd have secretly liked it while pretending it was stupid and worthy only of mockery. She liked Remus very much, but she couldn't be fully herself around him because Remus was so polite that if you blew up at him or bit his head off, he would simply wait it out. Lily couldn't be comfortable really getting angry at someone like that; it always made her feel like a bully. Severus would scream right back at you. Once she'd thrown an ink bottle past him, and he'd hurled a book about a foot wide of her head. Even in that year in hiding, when they'd been so tense and sometimes so unhappy - both separately and together - James would _never_ have thrown anything at her. In fact, he'd have probably tried to hex Severus black and blue if he'd ever seen it.

But in the days before she and Sev had fought all the time about his friends and the Marauders and the Dark Arts, Sev had been the one person she could be around when she was exhausted, and frustrated, and short-tempered. She didn't have to be perfect around Sev; she could act like a horrible human being but still go off at the end feeling like she wasn't, really. She'd never felt like that with James, even when she hadn't been able to be perfect, shining, wonderful Lily Evans Potter. She and Sev had been able to spend whole days together, nattering about virtually anything; and she had never remembered what any of it was, which always seemed to be a vital part of friendship to her, that the time just blurred into one long moment of being with them. She'd told Sev things she would never be able to bring her kaleidoscope of friends to understand; and there were so _many_ things like that, with her girlfriends. They were baffled that she would hang around with Sev, who stuck out like a sore thumb no matter what he did and was known throughout the halls of Hogwarts for a dreadful, even terrifying temper, and his Nose, and never seeming to wash his hair. She had never been able to tell them that Severus was the one person who was outwardly as out-of-place as Lily felt inside.

Even when she'd gone to Hogwarts, where everyone else did magic, not just her and Sev, and when she'd been fairly popular, and the most popular boy in school had done backflips in an effort to impress her, and all her friends had sighed over how lucky she was . . . secretly, in a tiny place, like a box she'd carefully stocked and hidden away, Lily had always expected to wake up one day and find that none of it had ever happened. That everyone would discover that really, she was no one special, just a Mudblood, a little freak. Sev had been able to understand that . . . and it had hurt so much when he'd said . . .

But none of that had ever made Severus her boyfriend. There were very distinct things one got up to with boyfriends, things one did not get up to with one's best friend. She would have noticed, thanks very much, if any of that had gone on with Sev. Oh, she'd thought about it, of course - in private - but it had always made her come over with high-pitched, embarrassed giggles, turning as red as her hair. That wasn't what she _did_ with Sev. The thought had just seemed . . . silly. She'd never even been able to imagine Sev being with anyone like that, in that way, at all—she couldn't even _think_ the words.

Sev's image coalesced in her mind, as he'd been today, his shoulders slightly hunched, squinting in the light . . . and then on the first night in her mother's parlor, rising from his chair like a shadow standing up from the floor . . . and some odd feeling fluttered inside her—

Horrified, she choked it off. What was she thinking? Was she _—what?_ She was _married_ right now, for Christ's sake! Even if her husband was currently a sixteen-year-old boy in mind _and_ body—

The empty juice glass slipped from Lily's slack fingers, thumping to the carpet as she froze in the middle of setting it on her night table. What if . . . what if James had come back, too? After all, if she and Severus had, why not James? They'd all died, all three of them . . .

 _That would be too much of a coincidence_ , said the Voice of Reason. And surely James would have been to find her already if he was the man who remembered being married to her . . .

 _Or he might not—I haven't been to find him yet, after all._ No, she'd been clinging to Sev, because Sev needed her and she needed him. As much as Lily wanted to throw herself into James' arms—the real James, _her_ James, the man she'd married, Harry's father, despite all their spats of the past year, shut up together in hiding, their tenseness, their silences—there was a different dimension to her need for Severus, who was so much older now and far more capable than she was, who knew so many things she needed to know. It was different with James—she had lost Sev in heart, and it had always hurt . . . after the way she'd left things with the boy Severus, the young man . . . she'd _had_ to go up to him in that diner, the night before Christmas Eve. God, if she hadn't . . . She'd have fallen to pieces by now, have gone utterly mad, without this grown-up Severus to help her, to tell her about Harry, to piece her heart back together.

If _her_ James were really here, she would find him soon, she would soon be with him; and if he weren't, well . . . she could see this James, at least. She could talk to him.

Of course, it looked to be a few days, until she got well enough to get out of bed and catch a train to the Potters'.

She drank a bit of the tea, its warmth soothing on her throat. Petunia had added honey.

Lily lay back against her pillows, on her side, and studied the tea cup with its pattern of roses. Petunia was so strange. In many ways, she'd become as impenetrable, as indecipherable as Sev . . . both the teenage-Severus Lily had broken with, and the man he'd become.

Who _had_ Sev become? He'd taught Potions at Hogwarts . . . he'd been Harry's teacher . . . but what else? What _kind_ of teacher? Had he been married? Was he a father? He'd implied he didn't have any friends . . .

The thought of Sev going through life with hardly anyone to turn to was . . . painful. Severus was so full of things he wanted to share. But he'd never shared them lightly, and most people had just turned away from him . . .

 _Like you did,_ whispered a part of her that she hated. Not because of what it always told her, but because she always heard it at times like these. She thought of it as her personal dementor. It was the part of her that rose from the depths of her heart to torment her with what she'd never forgiven herself for doing; for not doing; for suffering.

There had been times, after falling out with Sev, when she had felt as sick with remorse as she'd ever felt keenly justified. When she'd see him with those vile boys she'd hated, the ones who had put him into those stupid masks and robes, she'd felt both at once: she'd been right, but she'd also _been right_.

The only worse thing she had ever been right about was the fear that Voldemort would find them, find her and James and Harry, and tear their family apart.

And now here was Sev, who'd outlived her by seventeen years; who was, at times, even more frightening than she'd thought he would be. She remembered his half-crazed fright when she had slipped on the stairs, the glittering look in his face when he'd struck the Muggle on the street, the way in which he'd stood and left her mother's comfy sitting-room; the tone of his voice as he'd said _I was a Death Eater no longer._ If doubts that Severus was telling the truth had whispered in her mind since he'd climbed in her bedroom window on Christmas Eve, she had never even heard them, so certain she was that this was a Severus who had grown into a different person entirely.

And yet at the core he was still Sev; she knew she wasn't looking at a clever impostor in Severus' body, but at Severus, all grown up, and probably lonely, and grieved, and maybe even a little bit mad.

 _Severus_ , she thought, closing her eyes on the roses painted in a ring on her teacup. _What did you live through, when I was dead?_


	8. Chapter 8

Severus let himself back in the house that he'd grown up in and owned for twenty-one years, and would soon own again. The sun was setting, having spent the better part of the afternoon hanging weakly in the pale sky; the stronger light of sunset struck past the stacks of row houses and through the kitchen blinds, washing in gilded stripes across the walls.

He came in the back door, as ever. The lights inside the house were off, as ever, because his mother thought electricity was too glaring. But because of her they had always been able to save money on the electrical bill, on many nights going by magical fires and her Ambient lamp. His father had hated it, but there were times when he'd pissed away the money for the utilities and they had no choice.

Severus could hear the rustle of books in the sitting-room. His mother would be packing her library. She had always filled all the walls she could with books—the only indulgence her father and step-mother had allowed her. Severus had often wondered whether his mother would have sold the books had they been worth anything, but he wasn't sure; his mother was a hoarder, particularly of knowledge. " _Play to your strengths, Severus_ ," she had told him many times. " _Even if they seem weak_."

"Severus?" she called from the sitting-room. He weighed her tone, but it sounded calm. Not that he could ignore her either way.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he had probably been able to survive the Dark Lord so well because many of the habits of being a Death Eater had been ingrained into him—into all the pure-bloods, or half-pure-bloods—from childhood. Civility under duress. The expectation of punitive punishment. Unquestioning obedience up front, and silent rebellion when the watchful, punishing eyes had turned away.

He went to the open doorway warily, but she was only sitting in her armchair, the one upholstered in dusty forest-green velvet. It was a magical arm-chair; it snuffled occasionally, like a sleeper in the midst of a dream, and its clawed toes would wiggle at random intervals. He had seen it even in her youngest memories; she had brought it with her when she married, the way she'd brought everything she now owned. Except for one vital trip to St. Mungo's when he was very young, his mother had never, to his knowledge, been back to the magical world. All his school-books and supplies had been hers; she had even sewn his uniform robes herself, from bolts of black fabric she bought in town.

He wondered where her black mourning robe had come from. Knowing his mother, it had been part of her trousseau.

Right now, she was sorting her books into piles. He knew there must be some order to it; books were shuffling through the air with soft husking noises, dividing themselves into four separate sides of the room. His mother was reading, her left hand holding up her book, her right lying quiescent on her chair's armrest, her wand loose in her fingertips.

After a moment, she looked up at him. Her expression was smooth, giving nothing away.

She pointed her wand, but only at the battered old sofa, with its ugly olive-green upholstery. "Sit," she said, her voice as smooth and calm as her expression.

His mother wanted to have a talk. Great.

He couldn't remember if this had happened before. Sifting through the detritus of his teenage years, he found nothing clumped around his father's death but a dim recollection of it surprising him more than he'd expected, even at the time. Now he tried to remember if he had missed the old man, but he couldn't find any traces of it. It had all happened so long ago, and the worn-down emotion would have been faint even when it was new.

He crossed the room, avoiding the shuffling piles of books, and sat. The springs in the cushions poked at him. Was this the same couch he had offered to Narcissa? That shouldn't have been funny, but it was.

His mother closed her book and rested her hand on its cover. For a moment she only looked at him, but the talent for magic of mental agility ran in their family. He gently emptied his emotions. He didn't want her sneaking inside his head and seeing anything incriminating, like who he really was. His mother would be talented enough to tell the difference between a daydream of being thirty and a real memory.

The warmth from the magical fire in the grate tinted one side of his face. He heard a blackbird cry out in the cold, beyond the paper-thin windowpanes. Somewhere up the road, a car backfired, but in their house, all was silent.

"You will be seventeen in a few days," his mother said at last. "A grown man in the eyes of our world, if a young one."

Severus didn't say anything. When she raised an eyebrow at him, he said quietly, "Yes, Mother."

"Your father couldn't leave the house to you, as in the Muggle world you are a minor, so he left it to me. But I have registered this address with the Ministry as a magical dwelling, and on January ninth you will own the magical deed outright."

"Thank you, Mother," he said. It had always surprised him that his mother had adapted her duty to him in this way, securing him a Muggle home to live in. But his mother's life had been structured around the most Slytherin of principles: _Make Do._

"I have applied the standard enchantments that will make this house appear vacant and uninteresting to passing Muggles," she went on,"and certain light wards. When you attain your majority, you may alter them to suit you. Muggle expenses should not be a problem, as you may handle it all through magical means."

"Yes, Mother," Severus said by rote. He was glad he wouldn't have to figure out twice how to get water to run when the plumbing had been shut off with the municipality; it had been unamusing enough the first time around. He remembered twisting off one of the outdoor pipes and getting hit right up the nose with a jet of icy water. It had a large area to aim for.

"As your father's widow, I have received a small sum upon his death. I am leaving it with you." (As before.) "It should last you until graduation, when you're able to attain proper employment."

Proper employment. Damn, he was going to have to find a job one day, wasn't he? Old career paths having been blasted all to hell, as they'd been. The early days of Death Eater-dom had been rather lucrative.

"I will be going to stay with my aunt, Philomela." His mother made a low, almost unnoticed movement, but he caught it; she was twisting her wand tightly in her hands. He wasn't sure if she was aware of it. His mother had always used her wand the way most people used their hands. He had learned to read her posture, her movements, the shifting of lines on her face; had studied them until the slightest change telegraphed a range of information to him. This wand-twisting was a pure-blood's version of wringing her hands.

He knew why. Philomela was her father's sister, and demented. She drooled, and when she did speak, she screamed gibberish. She lived in a crumbling manor on the Isle of Man with a paid companion and two house elves. His mother had—and would shortly be again, it appeared—removing the paid companion and taking up residence alone with the madwoman and two bitter, downtrodden house elves. As far as Severus knew, Philomela had never recognized his mother as her niece, which was certainly one of the strongest reasons for Eileen's choosing her to stay with.

That, and she had never had very many options.

"Isn't she dead yet?" he said, for realism's sake.

"No."

He waited a few moments, watching in silence as she stared almost sightlessly across the room. He remembered going to visit her, Apparating onto that barren strip of rock on the edge of the slate-colored sea. The house was made of gray shale, the beaches were made of broken rocks, and the thin grey air was filled with the rush of the sea. He had always wondered if his mother felt peaceful there or hopeless.

"Mother," he said, wondering if he should say this at all, "you do not . . . have to leave."

She did not react immediately, but he knew she had heard him. "I do, Severus," she said at last. "I have never belonged here."

She looked at him then, the light behind her chair carving shadows deep into her face. "Do you feel comfortable in the Muggle world?"

He started to say _no_ but stopped. The hospital had been discomfiting (his own confusion as much as the chaos) but he remembered his first night back in this body, realizing on that cold, wet street that to Muggles he was no one. At one time, that truth would have tormented him. After a lifetime of living several fates worse than anonymity, it was a relief. He could never have had it, had he survived the war.

But that small comfort was in the short run. He didn't know near as much about that world as Lily did. Severus had learned more from her during holidays than his father had taught him in seventeen years. Because his father had never taught him anything, except how to resent the world until your bones cracked.

"I can handle it," he said. Perhaps he could, if he needed to try. He had handled far more difficult things.

"You should cultivate that skill," his mother said, "if you can. To a pure-blood, any pure-blood, that world is indecipherable. A good Slytherin does not ignore so large a part of the world, so massive a possible inconvenience. It places too much out of his control. But I have never been able to master it, and now it is rather too late for me to begin.

"But this is not what I wished to discuss."

She fell silent again, looking at him in the light that was now tinted only by fire. The patches of sunlight high on the bare walls had faded completely into darkness.

She said slowly, "I had been holding off having this conversation with you for a variety of reasons I won't bore us both by repeating." And Severus would never press, because proper children didn't. "But you are more than old enough for it now. I have hopes it may even sink into your head."

Severus only waited. His mother was luckier than she knew: anything sensible would sink far more readily into _this_ head. He was somewhat less of an idiot than his sixteen-year-old self. Somewhat.

"This last summer," she sounded almost pensive, "when you hid in your room all the months, and looked like someone had broken your heart, and never spoke that girl's name, I thought it had already happened."

"'It'?" Severus repeated.

His mother's stare was most definitely not innocuous. "I'll thank you not to interrupt me, Severus," she said in a voice that could have made the fire dip in the grate. "I believe I am intelligent enough to explain myself."

Severus decided it would be best to shut up entirely, not even to apologize. When she did not look any angrier, he knew he'd been right.

"From the first moment I met that girl, Severus," she went on, relaxing back into pensivity (as if her brazen look of disbelief at Mrs Evans' outstretched hand could be called 'meeting Lily'), "I knew she was going to break your heart."

Severus felt ice spreading out from this organ that was the object of his mother's distant concern, covering his veins like icicles on power lines.

"That is what happens to people like us," she went on. Her voice was growing distant, in the way that meant Occlumency was tipping one's emotions down a long, dark drain. "Particularly at the hands of those who are—well-loved. You won't dare tell me that girl isn't lauded by the undiscerning through most of the corridors of Hogwarts."

While Severus resented the thought of Lily's deserving only undiscerning praise, he could not remotely argue that his mother wasn't right: Lily had always been popular. Sometimes—many times—it had strained her, and for decades Severus had never understood why. Would she rather be hated, disdained, unnoticed? Did people who were generally beloved believe that widespread enmity was any less shallow than automatic affection?

"Lily is popular," he contented himself with saying, "yes."

"Why?" his mother asked, in such a way that suggested she knew the answer and was waiting to see if he did, too.

 _Because Lily is perfect._ But that wasn't the reason. They _thought_ she was perfect, in the way they wanted someone to be—lovely, talented, sparkling. She _fit_ well into their frame of expectation. They did not know that she had a dreadful temper, that she could say vicious things when provoked; that she could be self-righteous and pig-headed and hopelessly naïve, taking things too often on faith. They didn't know he'd let her use his Potions notes from day one, and then she'd been so guilty and yet pleased by Slughorn's assumption of it being all _her_ own work that she had only weakly tried to correct him; that even though her Transfigurations attempts were sometimes inspirational, at others they were total flubs. They had no idea she was indecisive, sometimes frankly lazy (especially when it came to competitions), and that even though she loved magic, she preferred the Muggle world, with its cinemas, nonsensical artistic movements, and cars and trains because she liked to be able to see where she was going as she went there. They would never dream that sometimes she felt like a fake, a pale imitation of a witch, a girl unworthy of being popular and well-liked . . .

. . . and then he had gone and shouted _mudblood_ at her, in front of at least fifty people. It was no wonder she'd been angry enough never to speak to him again. Without meaning to, he had sliced clean through all her insecurities and bruised a part of her he knew she had never shown to anyone else. Not before that day, at least. Of course she had probably shared it with Potter—she'd surely shared everything with him, everything that had once been only for Severus, as well as those things that would never be his.

And that was the crowning moment of bitterest irony: after all Severus' pleasure at cutting with words, all his mastery of making people writhe with insults, all his desire to demean, he had, with one word said to the one person it could have hurt him most to hurt, injured more cleanly and purely than he ever intended.

How could you say to someone, _You are perfect in every way to me_ , and mean even the parts they were ashamed of?

He said to his mother, "Because Lily seems perfect in every way that counts."

"Yes," she said, blinking once, as if she hadn't expected him to follow her. She probably hadn't. He sincerely doubted he'd have been able to answer that when he was really sixteen.

"She is lovely, she obviously has some money, and I imagine she's fairly competent in academics. Although not too much, because popular girls never are," his mother said, with the air of someone who had lived that truth. Severus knew she had.

"A girl like that, Severus, will be able to pick whom she likes. Of course, the cyclical nature of life means she will inevitably pick a man who is also able to pick whomever _he_ likes . . . but you must understand, Severus, that the likelihood that she will pick someone like you is very small."

His mother's dark eyes seemed large in the shadows of the firelight. Severus took all his hatred, his rage and chagrin at the truth of his, and shoved it deep below the surface that Occlumency kept calm and light.

"People do not fall in love for the things that are true," his mother said, and deep inside the drain his emotions registered surprise, because he didn't think he had ever heard his mother say that word: love.

She said, "They fall in love with what they only believe is true. For this reason the world is littered with broken hearts. When you live in dreams, they inevitably will shatter.

"Most people live on a scaffolding, Severus. You will hear words like duty, honor, love, repeated until you are sick of them. Many times you will hear them linked, as if being dutiful and loyal will receive you love, and that those you love will honor you. This is as false as a thief. And the more you believe it is true, the more you will be . . . disappointed . . . when you learn that it is a lie.

"The Princes have never dealt well with disappointment, Severus," she said softly. "It is not in our nature. You remember when I told you that Occlumency will dilute, eventually cripple, your ability to experience emotion as you would naturally, without it?"

He nodded, not speaking. It was his turn to have lived that.

"So disappointment turned to bitterness will make you incapable of living otherwise. I wish I could give you a guarantee, Severus, that if you did one thing or another you would be free of this . . . curse, tied as tightly to our bloodline as the mind arts. But life does not come with a guarantee."

"Except dying," he said, unable to help himself.

She looked at him. "Yes," she said, even more softly. "Except dying. But until then, you must deal with living. It's best to do it in a way that is not wholly spent wishing for that final guarantee."

In the winter darkness of the room, he saw her study her wand, run one finger lightly over the brambles and roses carved into the hilt. "You are nearly grown, Severus. This is the moment in a wizard's life when his family unveils his legacy. I have not always done things . . . properly with you. Sometimes that has been by choice, but at others I've simply had to make do. I have no wealth or property to pass to you, only the wealth and property of Muggles. I can give you books, but anyone could do this, and you can find them anywhere. Your talents for magic, for the mind arts, even your temper and your . . . penchant for unhappiness, were possessions passed from me to you whether I wished to or no. Our family's treasures have never been mine to give to you, only our curses.

"The only thing of lasting worth that I _can_ give you, Severus, is one truth: you cannot control another human soul, not in the way that is most vital. You can try. You can manipulate them; you can take away what they love, or give them what they desire; you can terrify them into submission, you can debase them, you can raise them to glory. They may even do everything you could wish, for a time. But one day your control will erode, and they will be gone, and for whatever reason you did it, those reasons will be as dust. They might as well have never existed. If you can learn this, Severus—really learn it, not simply _think_ it, but _know_ it, then you will gain the most precious commodity one can find: the knowledge that no one can control you, either.

"And then," his mother said, her eyes dark and steady and deep, "you will be free to live your life, with no need of guarantees."

* * *

_December 27, 1976_

Lily was certain that Petunia did not approach life the way normal people did. (Which, on reflection, was pretty ironic, since the desire to be _normal_ was the guiding light of Petunia's hopes.) Whereas a normal person would like an unwanted invalid to get better as quickly as possible and make themselves un-wait-on-able, Petunia had transformed nursing into the patient's torment. Somehow her trays with specially prepared soup and plenty of fluids had put Lily completely at her mercy. And Petunia didn't have much of it.

Lily had never thought she could feel so . . . _wretched_ having her pillows straightened, and her floor cleaned of its litter of tissues, and a constant flow of juice poured for her. When the Death Eaters were done taking lessons from Mrs. Snape, they could come get notes on Petunia. She could make a selection of crackers look as dangerous as a glowing wand.

Lily didn't even know how she was doing it. It was like the straight table cloth: she watched, but she couldn't repeat. Perhaps it was the glint in Petunia's eye, or the tone of her voice if she asked was there anything _else_ Lily needed? Perhaps it was the carpet sweeper that she would turn up with, in absolute silence, and run rattling over the crumbs-and-tissues-littered carpet beside Lily's bed, also in absolute silence. Maybe it was the way she always lined up the tissue box with the edge of the nightstand whenever Lily pulled out a tissue and knocked it crooked. Or it could be the tiny _sniff_ that came at intervals you couldn't predict, so you weren't sure whether to scream with frustration when it came or when it didn't.

Whatever it was, when Severus turned up in the doorway around noon, as silent as the ghost of a cat, his black eyes glittering, Lily almost wept with relief.

"Sev!" she uttered, wanting to reach out for him, point recrimination at Petunia, and blow her nose all at once. She settled for the nose blowing, and when Petunia turned to glare at him, pointing at her back. _Save me_ , she mouthed, making her eyes huge and pleading.

"Petunia," Severus said, giving no indication that he'd noticed Lily's desperation at all. "Got the carpet sweeper out for a little spin, I see. I suppose Lily's making a revolting mess."

Petunia didn't seem to know how to reply to this. Because it was Severus and the expression on his face didn't suggest otherwise, she clearly suspected she was being insulted; but it didn't make much sense as an insult, and moreover didn't sound like the sort of thing the Severus of her acquaintance would say.

She hesitated, her eyes flicking from Lily to Severus and back again. Then she clenched her hand on the carpet sweeper and said to Lily, as if Severus was a coat rack, "You need a juice refill." She managed to squeeze past him by ramming him in the ribs with the handle of the carpet sweeper, and also to get out the door without acknowledging he was there.

"What was _that_ all about?" Lily asked, blowing her nose again.

Severus shrugged as he nudged the door shut with one hand, the other rubbing idly at his side. "There was no real reply to make to that. Not one she could think of. As I thought." His attention flicked over her, almost dismissive, but somehow Lily felt like she was being x-rayed. "You look harried for someone who's been lazing about in bed for a whole day."

"That's _why_ ," she said, her tone half indignant and half whining. "As if _you'd_ ever stay in bed for an hour, Mister Worst Patient in the Universe. I distinctly remember you catching scrofungulus in fourth year and Madam Pomfrey having to strap you to the bed to get you to stay there."

"I believe the fever has addled your memory," Severus said. "Surely I never had so grand a title."

He pulled out her desk chair and sat in it, almost as primly as Petunia had done. Lily fought the urge to smile.

"Don't leave me alone with her," she whispered as the doorknob rattled. A second later, Petunia swept in, bearing another pitcher of juice, her mouth pinched into a line.

She glared at Severus, then glowered suspiciously at Lily. She set down the pitcher, straightened the tissue box, fussed with Lily's duvet. Severus was looking at Petunia as if she were a bizarre animal whose properties he was studying for suitability in deriving Potions ingredients. Then with a final scorching look around the room, as if there were nothing further even _she_ could do about it, Petunia sniffed twice and swept out again.

Both Severus and Lily sat in utter silence once she'd gone, as if they'd just witnessed a miraculous performance. In a way, they had.

"What in God's name," Severus said.

"She's been like that since yesterday," Lily moaned, groping for her tissues and toppling the box off the nightstand. When Severus tried to pick it up at the same time she did, their heads knocked together. Severus said something under his breath that, Lily suspected, probably would have made her blush steam if she'd heard it.

"Don't worry," she said, rubbing her head. "That's still better than Petunia for the past twelve hours."

Severus gave her a long, considering look. "Is it the tissue-box straightening?"

"And the sniffing. And the juice, and—just _everything_. I wonder if she's hoping to smother me to death?"

"Perhaps she's hoping she can bully you into convalescence."

"I _want_ to recover, if only to get away from her."

Severus had put the tissue box on her bedspread horribly crooked. She smiled fondly at it. He was wearing the black jumper again today; his hair was rather greasy again, starting to separate into thin clumps. His trousers had a hole in the knee. She wanted very badly to give him a hug, but knew he wouldn't take it. He was almost as bad about hugs as presents.

"So Mum got you to take the coat," she said brightly.

"You have a lot to learn from your mother" was all Severus said. He'd picked up a pen from her scattered desktop and was twirling it around his forefinger and thumb in a way that was rather mesmerizing.

"That's the truth," Lily said ruefully. She'd always wanted to be a mum like her own, with that firmness, that gentle patience.

Not like _Severus'_ mum . . .

"How's everything at home?" she asked. Hadn't she always asked this? And Severus had always given her the shortest, most noncommittal answers . . . but it had been more dreadful than she'd dreamed . . .

God, she'd been naïve about _so much_. And when she'd been most naïve, those had been the times when she'd needed wisdom. Maybe this whole re-do was some kind of salutary lesson in hindsight.

Severus said, "Mother is still packing. She has a lot of books," he added.

Lily smiled in spite of herself. "So that's where you get that."

"She's leaving a few of them to me," said Severus, either because he'd missed the point or because he'd decided not to turn his sense of humor on today.

"Have you figured out why that date's circled on your calendar?"

"Yes, I have," he said, dismissive.

She blinked. "Sev! Why didn't you tell me? Why is it?"

"For no very important reason."

There were no signs he was lying, but she narrowed her eyes.

"Oh yeah? And what was all that about knowing it was important? Sev, you said it yourself, you bothered to come home for it! You _hated_ leaving Hogwarts, and yet you did, because of that calendar date." Severus opened his mouth, probably to befuddle her with a lie, but she ploughed on: "I thought it might be Death Eater initiations."

There was a tiny pulse of silence. Then Severus snorted and said, "It's too bad the Dark Lord"—God, she wished he wouldn't call him that, it made her wince in a way _Voldemort_ never had—"wasn't, or isn't, so indiscreet at this point as to go around Marking students with big mouths. No, it isn't an initiation."

Well, her heart could beat a little more steadily now, but not easily, not yet . . . "But it _is_ to do with the Death Eaters?" she demanded.

Severus shrugged, as if it didn't really matter. "That was the only thing of any importance in my life at this time."

Lily swallowed. Severus' expression was cold and distant, but his hands had curled in the fabric of his trousers. Did Occlumency make emotions only _seem_ distant, while keeping them inside you, as strong as ever?

"So what is it? And if you say it's unimportant," she said, making sure the warning showed in her voice, even if it quavered, "I will scream. I _mean_ it."

Severus watched her, as if from a place deep inside. He was silent for so long, she thought he had retreated so far into himself that he'd forgotten about her. Then he said, in that quiet, perfect voice:

"The thirty-first was . . . is . . . to be my introduction to the Dark Lord."

Lily stared at him. She thought her ears might be ringing. "I thought you said . . ." she whispered.

Severus fell into silence again, his face as uncommunicative as a blank wall. Then he looked down at the green pen in his hand, and started playing with it, as if it were the most interesting new toy. At last he said, "Lily . . . I hardly know what, exactly, Gryffindor teenagers thought of the Death Eater movement—although I can guess," he added, half under his breath, "but you must understand what it _started off_ as being."

"I know what it—" she started hotly. Severus' weary sigh made something inside her chest blaze, but he held up his hand and she bit down on the urge to tell him exactly what Gryffindor teenagers, and especially this one, had thought about that cult of genocidal supremacists.

"I know what it turned out to be," he said, his voice cold. "I believe I know even better than you." The fury surged again, but she grabbed it and hung on, to ride it out, because he _was_ right about that. "But when it started, particularly in Slytherin, it was . . . nothing more than a movement. Politics. Subaltern politics - shadows moving in buildings deep beneath the earth, the way moronic teenagers think the world works.

"I was never able to explain the . . . mechanics of Slytherin house to you. But you remember the Slug Club? The whole bloody house is like that—power shifting, alliances forming, and rank—everything about rank. Who you know. Who you are. Who looks out for you. Because that is the way pure-blood families are. _They_ are like that, and the house with the greatest number of them is like that, and it forms a—almost an ouroboros. You cannot separate one from the other. At some point, very likely centuries ago, pure-blood politics _became_ Slytherin house.

"The Dark Lord is a half-blood, like me—did you know this?"

"I—no," Lily said, her tissue freezing halfway to her nose. "But . . . _what_?"

"He is the half-blood descendant of Salazar Slytherin, through his mother. He grew up in a Muggle orphanage, a boy called Tom Riddle. He knew he had magic from a young age, but he didn't know what it was, and then he walked into Hogwarts and was sorted into Slytherin, where everyone predicates your treatment on their knowledge of you. Slytherins do not bet on an unknown entity, nor on a fruitless enterprise."

Lily had a sudden vision of the cavernous courtrooms of the Wizengamot, filled to the rafters by little children in Slytherin robes. "Severus, you're talking about _eleven-year-olds_."

"Eleven-year-olds who have been brought up to use politics the way you were taught to turn on the television. Pure-bloods know each other, Lily, all of them. In part it's the way they control each other, but the truth is there simply aren't enough left for anonymity."

Lily recalled hearing something similar from Sirius. He'd been sneering, though; not calm and glassy as the sea on a windless day. "There are pure-bloods in other houses but Slytherin," she pointed out, although she wasn't sure what she was driving at.

"There are pure-bloods in every house. Just as there are half-bloods and Muggle-borns. Oh yes, we had Muggle-born Slytherins. Ambition, pragmatism, and resourcefulness are part of human nature. But Slytherin also operates in large part on reputation. The pure-blood families most loyal to it _want_ to believe its existence is a mark of distinction, because they see the entire world in shades of distinction. It is a way of looking at the world, entirely different from what most non-Slytherins would understand. Most of us in Slytherin learned how to conform to it, but some people are simply born fitting into it."

Lily felt like he was explaining something vast and profound, and she was too childish to understand. "So you're saying . . . that Slytherin perpetuates itself, because it's so hard to break out of the cycle, that the cycle has become Slytherin and become the pure-blood families who grow up in it, too?"

"In a way. To a certain extent that is true of all pure-blood families, which is one reason families tend to run in Houses. Part of that is pure-blood tradition, which is very deeply ingrained in each new generation. Every now and then you get a child like Black, who is so very unlike the rest of the family and relishes it, but they are quite rare. The children of pure-bloods are . . . not brought up to court disobedience. When you entered Hogwarts, in a very literal sense you began interacting with an entirely different culture."

She thought of his mother's slowly tapping wand and felt a chill in her stomach; even the way Sirius had grown quiet when someone mentioned _your father, Orion Black_ or _your mother, Walburga_ , the flashes of darkness in him. . . "Right . . . right. What does this have to do with Voldemort?"

"He was Slytherin by nature, not by instruction. He was a non-entity when he entered the house, but by his seventh year at school, most likely earlier, he had mastered the system to such an extent that all that pure-blood conditioning he'd been denied as a child was his to control. I told you pure-bloods love hierarchy. They love unquestioning obedience from their inferiors. They love to _have_ inferiors. Many of them do not like to function without some sort of superior, either—but the Dark Lord could, and that gave him a considerable amount of power. Slytherin teaches you that well-placed admiration is one of the greatest assets you can hold in life. The Dark Lord figured that out, and he . . . wrapped it around himself.

"And connections; these, too, are vastly important. To whom are you connected? All of his connections were political. Because they were not by blood, he had to start out low. But the Dark Lord was patient and he was clever, which any good Slytherin is. A good Slytherin knows his own ambition, and he sets it on a slow simmer, because to move too quickly or injudiciously can remove his goal from reach.

"The Dark Lord started in those places he knew well: with politics, and connections, and his base of admiration. He made friends within the Ministry, men in subtly powerful positions, who could get him what he needed to progress. Sometimes it was another contact; at others it was funds. He had people who spoke his words on his behalf, but did not use his name or his face. And in the beginning, he collected Death Eaters very carefully. There was a process of selection and recommendation; you needed a sponsor, as it were, even to get mentioned to him, and the process of actually meeting him was still more careful and involved.

"I cannot tell you much about the initial meeting because I don't remember. All my memories of it were Obliviated."

Lily had sunk into a kind of trance as he'd been speaking, knitted into herself by the sound of his voice; the strange world he was holding up to her, as if asking her to look into a mirror for the first time, where the world she had seen dead-on was suddenly flipped; and this vision of the Dark Lord as a skilled politician, manipulating pure-bloods who had probably snubbed him for years, before he gained power over them and the high-bred scorn all sloughed away, replaced with admiration, groveling, favors . . .

"How do you know you were Obliviated if you don't remember?" she said, bewildered.

"Because I _don't_ remember any of it, but I know it always happens for new recruits. The Dark Lord in the early days did not go around Marking everyone for the price of a song. In the early days it was a mark of _respect_. At school we used to talk of his Mark without knowing what the bloody fucking hell it was, only that it would mean great things happening for you, if only you could deserve his notice. That is how he _got_ Slytherin house, Lily. He knew it, as anyone knows it who has grown up in it for seven years. He knew exactly what to say to make everyone with a scrap of ambition want to live in his pocket. And to receive his Mark, his notice, his power, you needed a connection to get you there. Mine," he said, his lip curling, "was Lucius."

Before she could stop herself, Lily burst out in horrified confusion: "But James said Lucius was always such a dreadful snob—"

She didn't know what, but something in Severus' face made her blush. She couldn't even interpret his expression. "I mean . . . I don't . . . " She floundered hopelessly.

"Are you saying it makes no sense for him to keep greasy old Snivellus on the line?" Severus said, his soft voice rife with mocking, a gentler echo of that smooth and perfect voice she'd heard the first night back here; in his mother's voice when she had made Lily feel like a tiny, slimy thing. She didn't know whether this time it was directed at her, at James, or even at Severus himself.

"Don't," she whispered. "Don't, Sev. You know you're not."

He only looked at her. She wondered how many times Voldemort had seen that look.

"In fact," he said coldly, "it makes perfect sense. I told you that pure-bloods like the company of their inferiors. Why d'you think Black and Potter kept Pettigrew around?" Before Lily could summon any emotion but shock, Severus went on: "Think of me as Lucius' Pettigrew, if it makes it easier for you. I was one of his many little lackeys. He liked to have us on hand to bully and insult and demean, and in return we gave him our continued obedience and admiration. And because a Slytherin doesn't stint for good service, Lucius rewarded those of us who stuck it out. In my case, he connected me to the Death Eaters."

"That's horrid," Lily whispered, wanting to cry.

"It was what I wanted," Severus said, all the emotion bleeding out of his voice, like water poured down the drain. "Lucius was . . . pleased. And the Dark Lord . . . "

But he didn't finish. Lily wondered if he'd been going to say, _And the Dark Lord was pleased with me, too._ There was something in the bones around his eyes, something so dreadful and empty, as if she were looking down into someone's nightmare.

From instinct she tried to reach for him, as if her touch would reassure one of them; but as soon as she moved, he stood up from the chair so fast he knocked it over, hard enough that it rattled the desk. The juice pitcher jostled but didn't fall, but Sev must have thought it was going to because he lunged for it and slopped a good glassful all over his hand and wrist.

"Sev—" she started, stunned, for that was the last thing she'd expected. She started to swing her legs out of bed, to get up and go to him—

"Don't." His voice was low and harsh, no louder than a whisper, but whispers were soft and this wasn't. "Don't touch me." He was breathing faster than one should, simply sitting in a room. She watched him back away from her, pressing up against her closet door. "I don't—comfort—you can't know what it—"

She was frozen for a few moments, one foot on the floor, her other leg still curled on the bed. Across her small bedroom he was breathing erratically, one hand going up to jerk into his hair. Outside in the yard below, she heard Petunia's nasally voice, the sound of car doors slamming.

Lily hoped she was about to do the right thing. She raised her hand and pointed at her desk.

"Sev." He followed the path of her finger, but his eyes kept twitching away, from her hand to her shoulder to the ceiling to the door. "Write it out for me?"

He stared at her. He simply stared, for so long.

Then he turned to her desk and withdrew a piece of stationery from the left-hand drawer, where she'd always kept it, his movement as natural as if he'd sat at that desk for twenty years. Lily felt mesmerized as he found a pen in the center drawer, the green one she had written her lists with, on the night before Christmas Eve.

She expected him to fill the paper with words, but all he did was write one short line and hand it to her without looking.

All it said was _How can you bear to touch me?_

Lily stared at it for a long, long time.

She knew she could say a million and one things. There was a lot she could explain; a lot she wanted to. She wanted to ask a million and one things. There was a lot he could explain to her. But she knew there was only one thing she was going to say.

She looked up at him. There was probably no one on earth who could have interpreted his expression.

"Because you're my best friend," she said.

Severus did not react at all. Then a single tear rolled out the corner of his left eye, so lightly it was gone before it tracked all the way down his face. He raised his left hand as if he wanted to catch it, to wipe it away, to block her from seeing. He closed his eyes. His breath was so quiet she couldn't hear anything. Lily would have expected herself to be weeping, but her eyes were clear and dry now.

She folded up the paper and slipped it into the pocket of her pajamas, so Petunia wouldn't find it.

"So you're not going to meet Voldemort," she said, calm.

Severus was silent for a few moments, his eyes shut, his hand still pressed to his face. When he spoke, he sounded almost like himself again, even tolerably steady:

"Meeting the Dark Lord for the first time is not like going on a blind date, Lily. You can't just stand him up because you've heard he's got a wart or your enthusiasm waned at the last minute or you met someone else at the laundromat. Lucius would have got me this meeting. Ditching a Malfoy is only slightly less dangerous than ditching the Dark Lord."

"Gone on a lot of blind dates, have you?" Lily said, half-smiling.

"No. Somehow, being a Death Eater diminishes your enthusiasm for them. A little known side effect. Get back under your blankets. Do you want to suffer more of Petunia's ministrations than necessary?"

As she tucked herself back in bed, Lily had a moment's vision of Death Eaters perusing the classifieds for personal ads and had to pull her blankets up over her nose so Sev wouldn't see her expression.

"But . . . it doesn't make any sense to me that you'd _know_ this when you don't remember."

"I was Marked when I was eighteen, after leaving school." Even though he was sitting again, Severus kept his hand pressed against his face. Now it looked supportive. His elbow was leaning on the arm of his chair, his face in his hand, and his posture had lost its primness, gaining a slump that looked like weariness. "I had never, to my recollection, met the Dark Lord before then. But I knew I had met him at some point. The exact point was simply unimportant before now."

Lily studied him. It was true, wasn't it? She felt it.

She hated this helplessness. She wanted him to make this better, somehow, make it easy, not dangerous, like the kind of afterlife you were supposed to have, even though she knew it wasn't possible.

"D'you mean he Marked you after only meeting you _once_?"

"I suppose his standards had lapsed by that point."

"You shouldn't say that about yourself," she said, and then, feeling distinctly bizarre: "Even if it _is_ Voldemort . . . erm. But you can't—you can't go meet him, Sev, even if you can't stand him up! There has to be some—other option. Hasn't there?"

"I was thinking of leaving the country," Severus said, his face and voice utterly serious, "and moving to Nepal, and becoming a goatherd."

"You prat," she said, wanting to kiss his cheek but having to blow her nose instead. "Don't frighten me like that, for a second I thought you were serious. Like _I_ am trying to be."

"Well, you needn't worry. I spent last night formulating several contingency plans. I shall take care of it."

Lily narrowed her eyes at him, a suspicion forming . . . "Severus Snape," she said in no uncertain terms, "if you think I am just going to sit here blowing my nose while you run off and wrangle with a bunch of murdering Death Eaters, you're dafter than anything I can think of to compare you to at the moment."

"Leave you? Of course not. I was going to suggest you come along and blow your nose at them."

At first, Lily couldn't even sputter a reply, but she pulled herself together. "Good," she said briskly. "I'm glad to see you're thinking clearly. They'll never stop my mucus powers. _No one_ can."

"Would you be serious," Severus said with a black scowl, which was distinctly unfair.

"I'm being dead serious. You're not going off to deal with them by yourself, Severus. _No_."

"Who do you think I am?" Severus sneered just a bit. "A Gryffindor? My plans involve considerably more forethought than 'charge in and start blasting.'"

"Well, what _are_ they, then, Mr. Super Stealth?"

"One of the things I have learned over the years is that one does not discuss potentially lethal plans with invalids or Gryffindors. I'm not telling you," he said, slowly and patiently, when she only stared at him.

"Fine," she said, now harboring the distinct desire to jab him in the other side with Petunia's carpet sweeper. "Then I'll come up with some. _I_ think we should hide."

"We?" Severus said. She wasn't sure if he was more shocked at the fact that she'd include herself or at the daftness of the idea.

"Yes, we. I have lots of experience hiding."

Either Severus thought she was serious (she was only _half_ serious), or he couldn't resist the temptation to tell her how wretchedly uncunning her uncunning plans were. "It wouldn't work. Not in the long term."

"Throw me a bone, then. I'm not a crafty Slytherin. Charging in and blasting is the catch-all contingency plan for Gryffindors."

"I _am_ aware." He was silent for a few moments, retreating again to that place deep inside himself. She was reminded of his mother's face on Christmas night, in the hospital, staring at that painting of sailboats.

"The Dark Lord," Severus said slowly, "has never stood for being . . . discommoded. If I am to meet him on December thirty-first, he will expect that meeting." Something about the way Severus said 'expect' send a chill threading down Lily's bones. "Therefore, I cannot simply not go. But I could be . . . unable to."

"Unable to?" Lily said. She hadn't caught on yet, but there was a shrewd, crafty look on Severus' face that she knew meant she wasn't going to like what he suggested next. In fact, she was probably going to yell at him for it, so she might as well get ready.

"You want to help? You may do so by putting me in the hospital," he said, as calmly as if he'd said, 'I need you to go to the market and get me a bottle of aspirin.'

"WHAT!" Lily would have been satisfied if she'd made him jump, but the git didn't even twitch. "Have you gone utterly blinking mad! I'm not going to—what do you—augh!"

"Very well," Severus said, sounding bored, "then I suppose you'll help me compose a polite letter to the Dark Lord reneging on my invitation? Oh, and you'll need to assist with my obituary, too. If I'm going to commit assisted suicide, we might as well be organized."

"You know, earlier when I said you were so stupid I didn't know what to compare you to—well, I found something, and it's that plan! Absolutely not!"

Severus sighed. "I haven't even explained _why_."

"You don't need to! Sev, what am I supposed to do to you that's bad enough to put you in the bloody _hospital_? You'd be really hurt!"

"That's the idea," Sev said, giving her a the-plan-isn't-as-dumb-as-you look.

"I don't want to _do_ that, you thick git!"

"It's either you or them," he said, raising his eyebrows faintly.

Lily couldn't answer. She only stared at him, breathing hard. She shook her head, but she wasn't sure if she was denying him or if she just didn't want that to be true.

"I know you have the sufficient skill and power," Severus went on, his eyebrows still raised. "What was it you hit Avery with once, during a skirmish? . . . even I was impressed with the names he called you, once he recovered. Not a few of . . . us . . . " His face twisted for a moment, but she didn't know whether it was more with mockery or loathing, " . . . found themselves staying out of your way next time."

Oh, Lily remembered. "Contrapasso," she whispered. One of Dumbledore's. There was no way to practice it, because it required a human target in order to work—a target who had done dreadful things, and who was capable of feeling remorse, even if it was only a dying ember. Contrapasso blew it into a flame.

"No, Sev. No. I can't cast that on you."

Severus turned that considering look on her. She felt as if he was looking straight down into her soul, seeing her standing over the Death Eater she'd hit—Avery, she now knew—filled with vicious triumph and a ferocious self-loathing. But all he said was, "Something similarly nasty would do."

She started to shake her head again; but Severus must have sensed, or seen, that she was just protesting now because she didn't want to, not because she wouldn't, because his voice had turned patient. "Lily. I cannot cast curses on myself. It must look believable. I need to be seriously incapacitated, so that when my absence is challenged, I have the proper evidence."

Lily swallowed. "You said 'when,' not 'if.'"

"Deliberately, I assure you."

 _Oh God._ Lily shuddered. She thought of Severus saving her on that battlefield that smelled of scorched grass, the black sky tinted orange; the masks of the Death Eaters flowing out of the night, their metal flashing with spell-light; Voldemort blasting his way into her house, the sound of the door breaking, James shouting _Lily, go, take Harry, I'll hold him off . . ._ and the green light, the light that filled everything, that tinted her dreams now when she slept . . .

"Will this change things, Sev?"

He blinked at her; once, slowly. When he didn't answer right away, she knew he was thinking it over. She wanted to take his hand and hold on, have something to hold onto—

"There is no telling what we will change, and what will remain," he said at last, his dark eyes fathomless to her. "But I will never be a Death Eater again."

_Never again._

"All—all right—I'll do it—" Her heart hitched. "But I want you to know—doing this to you—it's _not_ all right."

"Of course," Severus said.

She wondered why his eyes were glittering like that, like the ocean on a full-moon night.


	9. Chapter 9

Lily supposed she ought to thank Sev, really, for giving her something new to fret over while she was stuck lying in bed, buried in her thoughts and feelings. She could put her baby and James out of her immediate notice for a bit and concentrate on the anxiety awakened by the thought of Death Eaters, the danger they posed to Sev, and the danger he _wanted_ her to impose on him.

But really, if it weren't for having something _worse_ she didn't want to think about, she would have hated his plan one hundred and ten percent instead of just ninety-eight.

Severus stayed well into the evening. Around two in the afternoon he made to leave, but she stopped him. "If you need to go home, to help your mum— but don't leave because you think I want you to go—"

"You need rest," he'd said, in that Occlumency way she was really coming to hate.

"I am resting. Please, Sev. You're a million trillion thousand times more restful than Petunia."

"She's going to punish you for my remaining here for so long," Severus said, but Lily took strong hope from the way he was lingering.

"Oh, please, I can handle Petunia. I just don't _want_ to right now," she elaborated, at the skeptical look on his face. She considered telling him about the dating remark, but for some reason the thought of doing so embarrassed her. In the end, she'd kept it to herself and asked him about Hogwarts instead. He seemed to think she was mad, wanting to hear what a professor's life was like. When she asked why he'd stayed, then, he said, "Hogwarts was my home." Then he looked almost embarrassed, or perhaps forlorn.

"Then tell me about it," she said, smiling, even if just barely, wanting to touch him but afraid he'd retreat into that deep, dark place he'd gone earlier, the one that threatened to break her heart.

But a little while later she almost wished he would go when he started sketching out the details of his plan to hospitalize himself. Lily hadn't even picked up her wand, but already she loathed this plan, herself, Lucius Malfoy and Voldemort for making her have to do this—for making _her_ curse the better alternative to Severus' being tortured or worse by a pack of human jackals.

But it was, wasn't it . . . she would do anything for Sev, if it meant keeping him away from the Death Eaters again.

_You'd even hurt him. Twice now?_

The alternative was something she had died of. The both of them had.

Severus said they would wait until she was more recovered, as that would be closer to the New Year anyway. They could take no chances with the time, he said. He must be in hospital on the night of New Years Eve, too ill or injured to escape for the meeting.

"Our falling-out last spring was widely broadcast," he said, as empty and faraway as the bottom of a dried-out well. "That will help make this believable, if we are challenged—but I do not wish anyone to be _certain_ it was you. If we are asked, we will say it was a hit-and-run."

Even though Severus had told her what curse it must be, she wasn't able to stop scrolling through her arsenal, feverishly searching for some other curse, something she'd forgotten. She knew a lot of jinxes to take an enemy down and give you time to escape, plenty of shielding spells and counter-curses, but she did not have many that were as destructive as Severus was looking for. Lily's desire had never been to hurt the enemy; her specialty had been defensive spell development, because violence always made her feel sick. She couldn't hex someone without feeling like she was being hexed in return.

But she was the only one who'd ever managed to hurt someone with Contrapasso.

"It should be that one," Severus had said as the sun was setting, his voice running over the sound of the juice he poured for her. She started to shake her head, wouldn't even take the glass, only clutching her hands on her blankets, as if accepting the drink he held out would be the same as agreeing to hurt him. But he said softly, almost gently, "It will be more than sufficient. You may not even need to cast it very strongly."

"Sev—at St. Mungo's—they won't know how to treat you."

"You know the counter-curse," he started to say dismissively, but she shook her head harder.

" _Technically_ , but I've never tried to cast it. Sev, listen, this is utterly mad. Think about what you're asking—you want me to hit you with a curse, bad enough to put you in the hospital, with no practice on _lifting_ it?"

"I have faith that you will manage it," Severus said, as simply as if he really did.

Lily didn't. "How did you get the curse off Avery?"

"The Dark Lord used _Finite Incantatem._ " He shrugged. "He was powerful enough to undo it."

"And if I can't undo it, no one at St. Mungo's will have that kind of power, will they?"

"You will be able to undo it."

Lily had felt the unique sensation, then, of a warmth in her heart at the same time every other part of her felt cold. She finally took her juice and sipped it. Her fingertips felt like ice.

He left around seven in the evening, when Mum broke into Petunia's domain. He was very polite and distant with her mother, and then he turned to Lily one last time and said, "Make Petunia feed you red meat, with lots of blood for strength." He was grave, but she knew he was making a Severus sort of joke. Then with one last, lingering look, so fast Lily thought she'd imagined it, he was gone.

Mum straightened Lily's room a bit, somehow making the task soothing instead of torturous. Lily didn't know how he managed it, but in this Severus was the anti-Petunia: he always made things a little messier than they'd been before he arrived.

"Did you have a good visit?" Mum asked, smoothing Lily's slightly damp hair.

"Of course," Lily said. She leaned into her mother's touch and closed her eyes. _Enjoy it while it lasts._

Mum stroked her hair for a few moments, slow and careful. "He's different than I remember," she murmured.

Lily smiled just a bit, mostly to herself. "He is."

Mum looked into both her eyes, as if searching for something. Lily looked curiously back. "Yes, Mum?" she asked, smiling still.

"All I want is for you to be happy," Mum said. Then she kissed Lily's forehead, her touch lingering, and with a final hand smoothed down the bedspread, took the empty pitcher of juice and left with a soft rustle of her dressing-gown.

 _I think that's all anyone wants,_ Lily thought, lying back on her pillows.

As the house settled into the silence of the night, she watched the lights from her star-jars twinkle on the ceiling and felt warm inside from Mum and from Sev. He had brought the stars back to her; she'd left them at his house on Christmas night, hoping it would make him feel a tiny bit better, or at least not as dreadful. She had taught him the charm that afternoon, wishing he'd bring his stars next time, to show her. When she asked him to, the tops of his cheekbones had gone a dull red, and he muttered something, but she said, "Please, Sev?" He gave her one of those long looks, unreadable all over, but hunched in on himself, and said, "If you'd like."

She wanted to see Sev's because the stars were a little different for everyone who conjured them, from the spell's being of the same branch of magic that yielded the Patronus charm. That was where she'd got the idea, actually. In the privacy of her thoughts, she called that family of spells "heart magic."

Remus' stars had looked like fairy lights, dozens of them, tiny and bright in a handful of colors. Sirius had always cast just one large, almost blinding star, which Remus had joked must be a replica of the real Sirius, the Dog Star, and proof of his self-absorption. James' had been a handful of cheery red lights. And Peter had never been able to . . .

Lily thought her stomach might disappear if she thought of Peter; disappear as if sucked into a black hole. She would not think of him. She could not, and stay sane. She would rather remember Severus listening to her explain the charm, untangling her words when they got too muddled, and then giving her another of those longs looks and saying, "As I said, it is really quite brilliant." And her heart had felt like the stars in her jar, full of light and warmth, because somehow she knew that grown-up Severus was even more sparing with compliments than young Severus had ever been.

James had said the same thing when she started working in spell development: "Brilliant!" so enthusiastically, and had picked her up and swung her around. All her friends had been relieved, too; her poor performance in battle had strung everyone out on anxiety. The problem was not that Lily _couldn't_ cast mean spells. She could, and in fear for her life she would; but witnessing the effects always brought her to earth, and it was too dangerous, stupid and suicidal to pause in the middle of battle to be horrified at what you'd done to someone who was trying to kill you. Severus hadn't been the only one to save her life; it seemed as though half the Order had at some point been forced to put themselves at risk rescuing naïve, stupid Lily, who lost her head at the sight of injured Death Eaters. The time Sirius had saved her, he'd gotten so angry with her that _James_ had gotten angry at _him_ , and they'd had perhaps the worst fight of their friendship. And Lily had sobbed all over Dumbledore's constellation-spangled robes that she didn't belong in the Order, she wasn't brave enough, she wasn't strong enough; she didn't want the Dark to win but she didn't have what it took . . .

Dumbledore had given her cocoa that tasted like hazelnut and mint and said, "I have often thought that those parts of us which seem weak in one light are our strongest assets in another. But a strength misapplied truly can make us—any one of us—weak, even dangerous. You are brave, Lily, and you are a warrior. You are simply not the same sort of fighter as your husband, or even his wonderful friend, Sirius." He smiled at her, offering her a violently purple handkerchief with a genteel flourish. "We must find a place for you, my dear, where your strengths may unfurl into their own magnificence."

"I don't have any," Lily mumbled, wiping at her face. "I'm really not as special as everyone thinks."

"As we go through life, many people may think we are special for the wrong reasons," Dumbledore said. "But it would be the height of error, my dear, to assume their short-sightedness meant we had nothing to offer."

So she had worked with him creating spells to keep fighters like James and Remus and Sirius safe. She had hoarded every second of her work as precious, even vital to her happiness: to keep them free of harm if possible; at all costs alive when they were hurt. She had mastered the Patronus more swiftly than anyone else in the Order, and spent ages helping the ones who struggled to cast it. She created charms for messaging and signaling that could only be seen by the intended recipient as long as you had cast the charm on one another before separating. She had dredged up Sev's old notes and mixed potions to counteract despair and fatigue and mania, which were better than anything the Order would have had otherwise because they came from Sev, whose brilliance with Potions had got her a reputation she didn't deserve. And when everyone had praised her cleverness, she had locked herself away and cried until her eyes dried out, because Sev had made these things to help people, Severus had saved her life, and Severus was a Death Eater.

But now she had him back, her best friend. She never, ever wanted to write him another letter she had to put in the fire from not being able to send. She _wouldn't_ let those Death Eaters get him. She would murder every last one of them and hate herself for it every day for the rest of her life if she had to, because that hatred could never compare to the grief of losing Severus to them a second time. Especially if this time, it was as a corpse.

She would even cast Contrapasso if it would keep him safe from them. She would forget the time she had seen Dumbledore cast it effectively, more effectively than she had, because when cast to its full power, Contrapasso had the power to kill. And if she had to die for it, she would not kill Severus.

But she would kill for Severus, she knew, because she wasn't going to live without him again.

* * *

_December 29, 1976_

"Are you sure it's all right that I'm here?" Lily asked in a whisper, her eyes shifting over the crowd.

"You were the one insisted on coming," he reminded her.

"I know, but—I don't know, I'm nervous now. I'm sorry, I'm being selfish." She reached up and fussed with his tie for the twelfth time. The suit was his father's, since Severus didn't have one and he wasn't about to show up to his father's funeral in a black jumper Lily had bought him at a Boxing Day sale. But he couldn't help noticing that his suit looked rather different from every other man's there.

"How are you being selfish?" he asked. Without waiting for her answer, he said, "Tell me, how out of date is this suit?"

"It's fine," Lily said automatically, which told him his hunch was right. "Was it—was it your dad's?"

"Yes." He'd seen it in his parent's wedding photographs. He didn't like the idea of wearing to his funeral the clothes his father had got married in, but he wasn't about to buy himself a new (well, second-hand) suit just because the thought of wearing this one was awkward. He'd been forced to get a new-second-hand suit for his father to be buried in, though, because after years of drinking, Tobias couldn't fit into this one. And it was the only one he'd owned.

"Well, I think it's quite nice," Lily said, smoothing his lapel. The inside of the chapel vestibule felt oddly warm, even though the doors kept clunking open to let the—were you supposed to call them "guests" if it was a funeral? was "mourners" a better word?—well, anyway, they kept banging in and out, gusting frigid air across the crowded space that felt warm around him and Lily, who smelled today like something flowery and indecipherable. "And men's fashions don't change _that_ much, you know." Then she asked anxiously, "You don't mind me wearing this, though, do you?"

He couldn't see what could possibly be wrong with the dress; it was black, with holes in the proper places: one for the head, two for the arms. That was about as much as he understood about female fashion. "Why in blazes would I mind?" When she bit her lip, he deduced that something must be bothering her, something more than clothes and her suitability as a guest-mourner at his father's funeral; these petty anxieties were only outlets. "What is it that's bothering you? And please do not tell me 'nothing.'"

Lily opened her mouth, but just then the crowd around them fluctuated, moving toward the doors into the chapel. "Later," Lily whispered. She took his hand and dragged him through the crowd, up to the front of the pews, where his mother was already sitting. As far as Severus knew, she had walked straight there, past the clusters of Tobias' friends, and sat alone at the end. The inside of the chapel smelled of varnish and old carpet.

Severus slid into the front pew next to his mother, dragging Lily down beside him when she tried to extract herself and hide in the crowds. "If you really don't want to sit here, don't," he said, "but if you're leaving because you don't think it's proper, please don't give a damn."

She sat, now chewing feverishly on her lip. Then she folded her other hand over his, so that she was clutching his left hand in both of hers. Severus wondered whose turbulence of mind this gesture was meant to quell. He was not sorry his father was dead. He was not pleased; he was nothing. He really did believe his father was better off dead. Hopefully his death was at least more peaceful than Severus' was turning out to be. What had his mother said, about disappointments in life? Severus understood exactly what she had been saying. Even his death was eradicating all his expectations.

His mother did not acknowledge their presence in the pew with her; she did not acknowledge anything. When the minister stepped up to his podium and the hushed chatter sank to silence, she made no sign that she'd seen, nor did she appear to hear a word of the bland, all-purpose eulogy being read out. Severus tuned it out himself; it was that, or start hexing. If any of this empty tripe had been read over _his_ dead body, he'd have come back from the grave to set things to rights.

After the minister stepped down, a couple of his father's mates read out little things they had written on cards and recited poorly, and Lorraine, now Mrs. Thorne—his father's first wife—got up and spoke a quiet, dry-eyed speech that put many people in the pews in tears. He could see her daughter, his half-sister, wiping continually at her face. It surprised him, now as it had then, that his father had been so well-liked outside his own family. But then, he had resented his own witch wife and wizard son and been resented in return.

Lorraine had told him once, _Poor Toby . . . he didn't get anything he'd dreamed of out of life._ Well, neither had Severus. Neither, reading between the lines, had his mother. Disappointment soured to bitterness hadn't been a legacy only passed from mother to son. Severus had got it on both sides. He'd simply chosen his mother's route of emotional isolation in place of his father's alcoholism.

Mrs. Thorne bowed her head a moment in silence, and then stepped down, returning to her front-row pew on the other side of the aisle. Someone started to clap, and then realizing you shouldn't at a funeral, hastily cut off. People began to stand, breaking up to head to the cemetery.

Severus' mother stood quite naturally then, without any prompting. Severus got up too, trying to remember how they had got to the cemetery the first time, when he heard someone who was not Lily say, "Severus?"

It was Lorraine. She looked younger than he'd last seen her; less silver in her hair. Her second marriage had taken her to the suburbs outside of Cokeworth, but she sent Christmas cards every year, featuring her family, the recent chronicles of her granddaughter, who'd grown up to work in a glitzy advertising job in London; and then, in later years, her son-in-law at his bank; the subsequent great-grandson. Several times a year, she wrote Severus a letter filled with idle family chit-chat, without fail asking him to dinner in each one, even though he had never once agreed.

It was . . . odd, he realized, to feel the past and present overlaying themselves like this. To know the trajectory of Bonnie's life and Lorraine's before it had even happened . . . to know Potter, the boy's, still . . .

If he still knew all that, did that mean that so far, nothing had changed?

"How are you, dear?" Lorraine said. She gave him a light hug, making him feel horribly awkward even though he'd been expecting it.

From the corner of his eye, he could see his half-sister, Bonnie, hovering with her step-father at the edge of their pew. Neither of them seemed to want to come any closer. Normally both friendly to a fault—Bonnie in particular was almost overbearing—their nerves today were probably his mother's doing. Even on a good day she was intimidating. In her black gown that looked like a trimmed-down version of an Elizabethan countess' and her veil of black lace, she would seem like a madwoman to Muggles. Even Lily's eyes had widened on seeing how his mother was dressed.

"Well enough," he said in a neutral voice to Mrs. Thorne; it seemed a safely innocuous remark.

"D'you need a lift to the cemetery, dear?" she asked. There were lines of tiredness around her eyes, but she was much more in control of herself than Tobias' mates, who were now clumped together patting each other on the back and wiping tears. She had been the one to arrange this whole enterprise, both times. Severus had remembered to ring her on Boxing Day and endured the horrible tension of standing awkwardly on the phone while she cried. But she'd pulled herself together and promised briskly to take care of everything.

"Thank you," he said to her now. He saw her brush Lily with an almost curious look. "This is Lily," he said, rather lamely, feeling in that moment as if all the stupidity of sixteen was his to command. "Lily, this is Mrs. Thorne."

Their how-do-you-do's overlapped; they shook hands. Lily's right hand returned to his left.

Mrs. Thorne's eyes followed the movement of Lily's hand, but all she said was, "There'll be plenty of room in the car, don't you worry—Bonnie can ride with Irving."

Severus chivvied his mother into the front seat of Mrs. Thorne's Gremlin and crammed into the back with Lily. It was a tight fit for his legs; he had to lean them to the side. Mrs. Thorne let the wipers knock a bit of ice off the windscreen before navigating the car out of the car park in the wake of the hearse. The line of roughly fifteen cars fell into place behind them. His mother and Mrs. Thorne did not speak at all. He and Lily didn't talk either. She had got a tissue from somewhere and was shredding it on her knee, staining her black wool skirt with snowy lint.

The weather was mildly sunny but cold, with a bitter, biting wind. The cemetery clung to an open hill, no trees, and the wind cut even more harshly across it. As his mother walked up the ice-flecked grass in front of him, her veil streamed out behind her. She did not speak or look at anyone.

It did not escape Severus' notice that all the respects paid by the guests had gone either to his father's best mate, John Landry, or to Mrs. Thorne and Bonnie. (Bonnie in particular kept crying into a handkerchief.) No one approached him or his mother, although whether it was from timidity or because they thought Eileen and Severus didn't care to be there, he wasn't sure. Everyone had known that Tobias' home life was broken. Some of his oldest mates, the ones who'd known him since Bonnie was a baby, had never entirely got used to the fact that he'd remarried over fifteen years ago. It wasn't as if Eileen had ever come around to parties.

Because of the cold, the service held at the grave-site was necessarily brief. Severus was thankful because he was exhausted. He could feel his head beginning to spike with the pain of Occluding the grief of over fifty guests.

But it was over not long after. A few words were said over the hole battered in the hard earth; the coffin with a spray of flowers was lowered, and then the guests began to trickle away, clutching their lapels shut over their throats or clapping hats to their heads, moving in clumps against the wind.

His mother stood at the head of the grave, looking down into the hole dug into the icy earth. She gave no indication that she felt cold or noticed that she wasn't there alone. Severus stood next to her with his arms folded in a futile attempt to block the wind, wondering what he should do. He couldn't remember how this had gone the first time around. He'd probably been kicking at the dirt and scowling, wishing his mother would hurry the hell up with whatever bloody mad thing she was doing and take them home, out of the cold.

"Tell Mrs. Thorne to go," his mother said to him softly, without turning. "Tell her I wish to remain a while."

He went to Lily, who stood beside a headstone carved in rosy pink stone with her arms wrapped around herself, shivering in her coat and funeral dress and black hose. "Mrs. Thorne will take you back—"

"What did you say to me in the pew?" she asked, wiping at her nose. She was probably wishing she hadn't shredded that tissue. "Forgotten already, have you?"

"I don't want you to relapse," he said. He wanted to draw her in close and wrap her in the sinfully warm coat she had bought him, but he would never be able to do that. "My survival depends on your nose not leaking everywhere."

"Ha, ha," Lily said, her smile tight, maybe with cold. "I'm not leaving you."

Severus told himself to stop being pathetic: the hope that flared like a match in a dark room. She hadn't meant it that way. She wouldn't.

He saw Mrs. Thorne off the hill. She didn't want to go, but she had no recourse to stay. She looked Severus over, her gaze worried, and then she actually gave him a hug—lightly, mostly her hands on his shoulders. "If you need anything," she said—her eyes flicked to his mother—"either of you, Irving and I will give it in a heartbeat, and be happy to."

"Thank you," Severus said again, gravely, knowing that, now as then, he'd never ask her for anything.

She seemed to sense that. "Well . . . " she said, sniffing against the cold, "good-bye, Severus. Take care of yourself, love?"

Then she joined her husband and daughter, and they made their cautious way down the hill after the others, the last to linger in the harsh wind. Above the cemetery, the clouds at highest altitudes were stripping away to reveal a blue of surprising depth, for the end of the year.

Lily, who'd stayed at the foot of the grave while he bid the Thornes good-bye, shuffled over, her hands tucked under her arms. "Was that your aunt or something?" she asked. Ministry decrees or no, if her teeth started chattering, he was Apparating her home.

"My father's first wife."

Lily had been squinting against the wind, but her whole expression opened in surprise at that. "I didn't know your dad ever had . . . " Then her surprise trickled to embarrassment. "I'm sorry."

"How could you possibly have known if I didn't tell you?"

She poked at the dirt with her toe. "Was that other woman your sister, then?"

"Half-sister, but yes."

"I thought she looked familiar . . . She's quite a bit older than you, isn't she? She looks - what, at least thirty?"

"Bonnie's some fourteen years older than me, yes. They had her very young."

Not, he realized with a flash of sickened realization, that his father and Lorraine been any younger than she and Potter when they'd had the boy.

If things continued on their formerly set paths, they would be right back at that point in three years . . .

If she married Potter again - if she even so much as held hands with him, walking down the fucking street - he was goddamn well moving to the Cyclades. And she was sure to do it. She fucking _loved_ that perfect, golden bully—didn't she?

She hadn't mentioned him often, in the past few days. Nor had she gone haring off to find him, as Severus had learned to dread. Even with a head cold, he would have expected her to have dragged herself out of bed in search of that wretched creature she'd married. Hadn't they been madly, blissfully in love? The pictures in the papers, which he'd ripped out and burned, every one, of them happy and smiling; the voices on the street, chattering _The Potters this_ and _The Potters that_ , each spark of approval like a spike through his heart—

But Lily's heart now seemed to be full of the boy, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Questions flowered about Black and Lupin, the Longbottoms, her sister, but they always wound back to the boy. Severus found that was ten thousand times better than her head being, apparently, full of Potter. He wouldn't have thought she'd have had the perspicacity to withhold on that score.

Had she known—did she guess—why he'd hated Potter Senior so very, very much? Sweet Mother of Christ, he hoped not. It had been his only consolation through everything, that she'd never seen that part of him—that she'd never known and still married the boy who had hounded him because he had to _win_ . . .

The flaring color of her hair caught his eye; the wind carding it into her face. He ached, fiercely, through his blood, down to his bones. She pushed the vivid strands away, tucking them behind her ears. "She seemed . . . "

Oh—still talking about Lorraine. He pushed his pain beneath the surface of his Occlumency. Lily was probably wondering how a first wife and daughter could be more broken up by the death of a husband and father than the wife and son who'd lived with him at the time he'd died but feeling it would be gauche to point that out. But his father had never resented Lorraine and Bonnie - his Muggle family. . .

Severus remembered Lily asking him once, _Doesn't your dad like magic?_ and he'd replied, _He doesn't like anything much._ She hadn't realized how close to the truth she'd hit. He hadn't either, at ten. He hadn't had the slightest insight into the matter until over a decade later, when his mother was doing one of her scarce motherly bits, asking him if he'd given any recent thought to getting married. Their family had always been the sort to fight to keep doors shut.

 _Don't choose a Muggle, whatever you do,_ she had said. He'd replied, suppressing his irony and chagrin, _I wouldn't have thought my blood was pure enough for that to matter, Mother._ And she had looked at him with unfathomable distance and said, _Blood matters nothing next to happiness. No marriage can prosper, Severus, unless it is between equals. Muggles will never be our equals. We might think it, we might wish it, we might even believe it with all our hearts, but in the end, we are always the ones with power, and they without. And you cannot build a life with that cold truth lying between you._

If his father had ever met Petunia, they'd have probably united in bitter sorrow. Had Petunia cried, at Lily's funeral, or had she remained as dry-eyed and distant as Severus had done here, both times? Had she even been invited to Lily's funeral? Would she even have gone?

He hadn't. It was funny how love and resentment could work the same result.

But it was over; his father was dead; and despite whatever this return was, of his and Lily's, there was no fixing what was past. If his father had shot back to a point some twenty years ago, he could get a vasectomy and not have to worry about siring a son whom he'd feared and resented as much as he'd feared and resented his wife.

Severus hadn't seen or spoken to the poor, miserable bastard in twenty years. It was over. Even if he didn't want it to be, it was over.

He said abruptly: "Your teeth are chattering. I'm taking you home. Wait here."

"Sev—" Her hand navigated toward his arm, but he pulled away, pretending not to notice. Pomona had once told him that when it came to anything emotional, he was as good at expressing himself as a fourteen-year-old boy with a concussion. He'd told her to piss off. Even at the time, he'd realized he had only been proving her point.

He drew up to his mother, who was simply standing over the grave while the workers shuffled dirt onto the coffin below. She had her bare hands folded at her waist, her veil draped back from her face. She looked as calm as if she were only standing by a river, watching the water run past.

"They're throwing the dirt on the flowers," she said, her voice equally calm, as Severus came up to her. "It seems wasteful."

Her voice lapsed and the hush of the wind rushed in. "His life was wasted," she said then, quiet. Her eyes weren't on the grave, but at some point out in the cemetery, with its rows of mismatched headstones and frozen grass. Severus didn't know what to say.

"It shouldn't have been," she said. "And they should have taken the flowers out."

"Hot-house flowers have no scent," he said, although he had no idea what that had to do with anything. Perhaps there was no reply to make.

"Don't they? What an odd thing to grow. If you conjure a flower and it has no scent, you've not done it right."

Then she took his arm again, for the second time in a long week, and turned with him to walk down the hill. "When I die, Severus," she said, her voice as distant as her gaze, "don't bury me. It would be a poor thing to spend eternity locked in the earth."

"Was it Lorraine's decision?" he asked, motioning for Lily to walk with them. She approached with an expression that was somehow brave, resolute. She really did not like his mother. It saddened him, in that faint place of emotion far away from the safety of Occlumency, that his mother had done that.

"Yes. Although it's what he'd have wanted. But I think it would be better to become ash, and sink into the wind."

For the rest of the day, she did not say a single thing more. After he had taken Lily home—she'd kissed his cheek, before slipping up the sidewalk into her house—and returned to Spinner's End, he found his mother sitting silent and unmoving in his father's room, on an old, uncomfortable chair, looking out the little window to the ribbon of the river that flowed into the horizon, and disappeared over the hill.


	10. Chapter 10

_December 30, 1976_

It was dark when the train pulled into King's Cross Station.

Lily had never taken the train down to London on September 1st; she and her parents and Petunia had always driven. In fact, they'd always gone down on the last day of August and spent the night in London, since the trip was so far. She had sometimes complained about having traverse half the country to get to the school train (especially in company with her sister), only to go back up through her own shire and onward to Scotland. Why couldn't they just drive up to Hogsmeade from home? It would have cut the trip in half. As an adult she understood—you couldn't have hundreds of Muggles driving through the streets of Hogsmeade; she'd been stupid even to think of it—but more than a couple of times, she wished she lived in the south. Especially since Petunia always made it a dreadful two days.

She had never gone down to London with just Sev, the way she was doing today. And they weren't headed to Hogwarts today. They were going to London so Lily could put him in St. Mungo's.

The train ride took about three hours, which provided Lily with enough time to inform Severus in categorical terms how daft his amazingly daft plan was. But the infuriating git only half-listened with an expression of polite boredom while reading first a copy of the _Yorkshire Post_ and then an old _Rolling Stone_ magazine with Led Zeppelin on the cover.

The irony of now badgering Sev about his plan to evade the Death Eaters, when five of her years ago she had been badgering him about his plan to _enter_ the Death Eaters, was not lost on Lily.

"I had forgotten a great deal of this happening," Severus said, folding the newspaper away.

"Well, it's been a long time." Lily flipped through the _Rolling Stone_ , but nothing in it really interested her. She only knew Led Zeppelin because Sirius had listened to them. He'd tried explaining what he called "the artistry" to her, but Lily had found technical discussions of music only slightly more interesting than Quidditch. What had amused her most was the idea of a pure-blood boy from a family whose motto was _Always Pure_ explaining the intricacies of Muggle rock to a Muggle-born witch.

"How d'you think we'll do in school?" she asked. "I wonder if I remember _anything_ about Herbology . . . "

Severus was folding the creases in the paper so finely, she thought he might tear it down the middle. Something about the movement made a little warning light blink on in her head. But all he said was, "I imagine your Charms work will stun Flitwick."

"And your Potions old Sluggy. Sev, why are you trying to destroy that paper?"

"I am simply trying to be tidy," he said, laying down the paper with care on the table they'd commandeered.

For a few moments she fiddled with the magazine, trying to figure out what he wasn't telling her. She watched him—or his profile—but the monstrous curve of his nose gave nothing away. He simply sat with his hands folded on the Formica top and his face turned toward the darkening window. The deepest point of the sky was the color of a new bruise, paling in strips toward the horizon, which shone icy blue above the shadowed ground with the last light of the sun.

"You're _going_ back to school, aren't you?" she asked slowly.

When Severus didn't answer right away, she knew her suspicion was right on the mark. She found that she was doing to the magazine what he'd done to the newspaper, pinching her fingers along the creases, and dropped it to the table.

"Sev!" she whispered.

His eyes cut toward her, but he didn't move from his prim, simple posture. "I had not decided," he said, as if she'd asked him whether he wanted to get curry for lunch or fish and chips.

"Sev, how can you just not go to school?"

"By not going," he said. "Quite easy, really."

"But—but what about your—tests?" It sounded lame even to her.

"If you mean how will I obtain employment without graduating, I'm sure I could figure out a way," he said. "But strictly speaking, I may not live that long."

A chill blew through her—all the way down into her soul, it felt like. "Severus Snape," she said, her voice half a whisper, "if you are feeling suicidal, you can find someone else to assist you in popping off." When he didn't say anything, she almost gasped. "Is that—is that what this is about? Getting me to hex you—to put you in the—are you trying to—"

"No," he said, sharp and hard. "I am not asking you to murder me."

"Aren't you? Because this curse, this curse you want me to do to you, it can kill, Severus."

He did not answer right away, but his eyes had begun to glitter strangely again. Lily's stomach clenched. He said:

"I would not think Dumbledore invented that curse to be kind. Tell me about the counter-curse."

"I will if you tell me what you're planning to do about school," she insisted. When he gave her an impatient look, she gave him a stubborn one right back, as if to say, _Well?_

He sighed, sounding irritated. She resisted the urge to roll up the magazine and thwack him. "It seems particularly pointless for me to return. For one thing, I was a professor for seventeen years, if you will remember."

"Oh." Lily blinked. "Oh . . . Lord, that'll be awkward, won't it?"

"All I need do is slip up and call Minerva by her first name. I am accustomed to _giving_ detentions, not serving them."

"You call her 'Minerva'?" she said, awed. "She was in the _Order_ and I didn't dare call her that."

"It is difficult to maintain personal distance from someone when you've seen them napping in a pool of sunlight. And when you've spent years taunting one another over the Quidditch cup—we'd despise Filius and Pomona whenever they won it—which wasn't much," he said with faint smugness.

Lily tried and found it easy imagine Severus gloating about Slytherin's taking the Quidditch cup, and Professor McGonagall flexing her claws at him. It would have been in the staff lounge, and the other professors would be there, maybe with essays for marking . . . did they read them out loud to each other, mocking the particularly woolly ones? Did they swap stories of points they'd taken for this stupid transgression or that one? And now he was going to have to go back to taking instructions from those people, from being on a level with the Heads of House, a peer, to being a student . . .

"Wait, does that mean you were _Head_ of Slytherin?"

"I was. Really, it was dreadful," he added. "My students bothered me incessantly. The things adolescent pure-blood girls get up to would make your hair curl." He shuddered. "Merlin, I hate teenagers," he muttered to himself.

And to go from a position of absolute authority to being subject to the authority of more than two dozen people . . . Severus wasn't even a prefect.

She studied him, biting her lip. He wasn't looking at her; she didn't think he was looking at anything inside the train. There was an almost . . . faraway glaze on his face, as if he were looking back into the past, into those memories. He'd said to her, " _Hogwarts was my home_." Not 'is' but 'was' . . .

What was he thinking?

"I can see why you don't want to go back," she said, watching him carefully. "I'm not even that thrilled about it, and school's not so far back from me."

"I don't merely not want to go back; I dread the possibility." The expression of consternation that followed a split second later told her he hadn't meant to admit that. "But it is not just the students. I don't have confidence in my ability to act . . . unobtrusively. I have forgotten too much what I was like." He fell silent then, returning his gaze to the window.

Lily thought back to her own school days . . . and realized with a sickening jolt something that had not previously occurred to her, because she was some sort of absolute idiot: if she went back to Hogwarts, she was going to be around James and Remus and Sirius and Peter _every single day_. She was going to go to class with kids she _knew_ were going to grow up to be Death Eaters. She was going to eat breakfast with people who had been _dead_ to her. And she was going to have to pretend that _everything was normal_.

She had been concentrating just on getting from one day to the next; hiding everything from Mum and Petunia, trying to understand what had happened to her and Severus; and then pushing everything but this Death Eater nonsense out of her mind in order to deal with it, because it wasn't nonsense, it was a dark, haunting presence in their future, close enough to touch . . .

"Severus . . . "

A tired-looking Muggle with a red nose and a briefcase came through the train car door with a hiss of hydraulics, shifting down the aisle to the seat behind hers. She got up and slid around the Formica-topped table onto the ugly-patterned cloth seat next to Sev, who looked startled for a second—but then it vanished beneath his Occlumency, like a fish darting beneath the surface of a lake.

"Sev, how deep in this Death Eater thing were you at this point?" she asked, keeping her voice low.

Severus looked at her along his cheekbones. He had gone quite still—moving beneath the surface of his Occlumency, she knew, to that place where emotions were quiet.

"I was meeting the Dark Lord on a personal recommendation, Lily."

Whether it was the versatility of his practiced voice, his words or the idea, Lily felt cold down to her bones. It wasn't because of who he'd been, because that boy was as gone as if he were dead; she knew that absolutely. She felt cold because of what it meant for Severus . . .

For the first time, she saw his insistence that she hurt him to be a mark of determination to get out of this Death Eater thing alive. She remembered Sirius, when Regulus had died from defecting, trying to look hard and uncaring, but his eyes hadn't glinted, they had shone all over; the kind of shine you only got when you were trying not to cry. " _Got in and couldn't take it . . . but you don't leave the Death Eaters . . . not on your own two feet, at any rate . . ._ " He'd smoked cigarette after cigarette, until Lily hadn't been able to smell that sickly imprint of smoke without thinking of Sirius and Regulus, whom she'd only ever seen from a distance in the halls of Hogwarts.

"Sev, is it true that Death Eaters who defect . . . " She had to bring herself to say it. She'd fought them, and she was going to be fighting them again; she would bet all her powers on that. "That they—"

"Death Eaters, yes." And she wished she wasn't grateful to him for cutting her off, but she was. "At this point I have not been Marked; I haven't even met the Dark Lord. When I miss his meeting, he will simply write me off as useless. It is Lucius and the others I will have to answer to, and they won't kill me."

"What will they do?" Her fingers had crept onto his arm and were digging in, the stiff, sharp follicles of the woolen coat she'd bought him piercing beneath her fingernails.

"Nothing I can't survive."

Tears pricked at her eyes, because he wasn't being sarcastic. "Is this part of why you don't want to go back to school?"

"It would be unpleasant," he said, looking out the window once again. "But I am used to . . . that sort of thing."

 _To being targeted . . . bullied . . . hated_ , whispered her personal dementor. And—oh God, at this time James and Sirius were still bullying him. The memory was like a solid punch to her gut. She couldn't watch that. For a long time after she'd sunk into their unit of friendship, she'd been unable to reconcile those _monsters_ who targeted Sev with the young men who were so kind and generous and loving . . . it was as if they were two different sets of people. But Sev had never seen that side of them because they'd never shown it to him, the same way he'd never shown anyone but her the side of him that had made her ache every day they were apart. And how he would feel, returning to all that, to them, to their treating him like that . . . How could _she_ endure it . . .

She pressed her forehead against his shoulder. "Some afterlife this is," she whispered, her half-smile feeling painful on her face.

Severus did not reply for so long that she thought he wouldn't at all. Then he said, his voice quiet and—normal, not liquid or seductively dark or poisonously perfect; just normal, like the Sev she had heard since she was nine: "It has its moments."

She moved her eyes so that she could see his face, but he'd turned it away again, toward the window. The scattered lines of his reflection lay over the glass, patchy against the darkness. She could see the washed-out red of her hair folded over her shoulder on one side, against his arm on the other.

"Yeah," she said, keeping her voice quiet in the space around them. "It does." She moved her cheek slightly, to get it more comfortable against his shoulder. "If it hadn't—if you weren't here . . . if you weren't I'd have gone mad. I couldn't have made it through this."

"You'd have survived," he said, turning his face away scantly more. She wanted to touch his chin, nudge him to look back at her, but she didn't have the courage. "You are strong."

"Survived, maybe. But you're the only reason I have any hope."

His chest hitched—just a bit, so slight she might not have noticed it on the other side of the table.

"A pretty dim hope," he said, his voice as faint as if it were coming through a poorly tuned radio.

"Never in a million years."

* * *

 

In London's cold semi-darkness they prowled through back streets, wands out but low against their hips, until they found an abandoned lot nestled in between a graveyard of empty warehouses and a broken-down old neighborhood. A single white house with vacant dark windows that reminded Lily of Severus' Occluded eyes stood at the end of the overgrown lot, whose asphalt was cracked with weeds.

"This place?" Lily said, shivering in her coat. It was not so much the wind, since the warehouses blocked it to the left and the tall brick houses to the right, but there was something so . . . desolate about it. Mr. Snape's funeral had been two hundred times more cheerful than this place.

"Yes," Severus said, his back to her as he looked it over. His movements were precise, cautious, careful. She envied the way he could move so silently; every step of hers seemed to crack into the heavy silence. "No one will run us out of here, and I don't trust the warehouses. We will be safe, Lily," he added, glancing at her face. "Lucius won't search Muggle London. These precautions are so that no one sees us until we wish for them to."

Sure, they were very totally safe. Until she hurt him. "Well, if we're done scouting, let's get in," she said, scrubbing her hands over her upper arms, "before I turn to a block of ice and that's our plan shot to hell."

They threaded out of the back alleys, Severus moving ahead of her but close, navigating them around voices that drifted occasionally around corners, so they never saw anyone, nor anyone them. Out on the larger street, where traffic lights blinked on and off and cars puttered, they found a pub hazy with smoke and stuffed with laughter, most of it drunken. They stayed there till last call, cigarette smoke soaking into their clothes and hair, Lily trying to find something stupid to talk about, because sure enough, she was thinking of Sirius and Regulus again; Led Zeppelin and the way Remus' eyes used to crease when Sirius lit a cigarette with a snap of his fingers.

They checked into the first hotel they found. Only the O in its sign was still working, but its windows shone patches of light down the sidewalk, which was how they found it; the only thing lit on that dark side street down from the pub. The hotel reminded her of Sev's house: cramped, dark, with cheap, peeling paint on the walls.

Their room had two beds, of course, rickety old twins. Some unidentifiable thing must have occurred to make Sev nervous in the time between scouting the lot and getting to the room; he was obviously in jitters, moving about the room as if every piece of crappy furniture was made of glass and twitching at loud noises on the street, like a pub-ful of drunks stumbling home. And his jitters were affecting her; or perhaps it was the desolation of the room, with its press-wood furnishings stuck with peeling contact paper to resemble wood, and the walls with funny stains, and the water that ran rusty in the sink for a couple of seconds after you turned the knob in the loo down the hall. Aside from her dread of tomorrow she felt fluttery.

The drunks were all gone home by the time they put lights out to try and sleep, but the radiator rattled like an arthritic rhinoceros, and her bed was so uncomfortable that she kept rolling over to find a good spot, except there wasn't any.

"Lily." Sev's voice coming out of the darkness made her feel very odd, sort of prickly and hot all over, as though nettles burst under her skin. "Do you want to switch?"

"What?" She realized she was whispering, which was stupid. "Switch what?"

"Beds. You keep twisting."

"Am I keeping you up? I'm sorry—"

"I've slept on worse, but this one might be slightly better if you—"

"It's fine," she said. "I'm fine. I'm just—I don't think I could sleep if it was the feather bed of the Queen of Sheba."

At first she thought he wasn't going to reply. She lay cramped on her left side, trying to ignore a spring poking at her. The bed probably creaked when she moved.

A moment later, she knew it did when Sev's bed launched into a symphony of squeaks, creaks and groans as he got up. She heard him shifting around the room in the darkness. When he opened the door to the hall and grainy yellow light washed in, she sat up, squinting.

"Sev, what—"

"I'll return in a moment or two." He went out.

Wondering what on earth he was up to, she turned on the lamp between the beds. Surreptitiously she poked his mattress, but it was every bit as bad as hers.

When the door clicked open, she looked up to find he'd brought two blankets with him, although she didn't know why, because the beds already had blankets.

"Up," he said, pointing at her bed. Nonplused, she rolled out of it; he peeled back her covers and sheets and stuffed the blankets underneath them, atop the mattress. He had brought her padding.

"Where's yours?" she said. "One of those should be for you."

"I don't need it."

"You should have something! These beds are a nightmare— use the duvet, there—"

She wreaked the same havoc on his bed, folding up the duvet and trapping it beneath the sheets. She lay down again, experimenting, and found it was just shy of decent. A symphony of springs wasn't digging into her anymore, at least.

"That's pretty brilliant," she said as he moved to turn out the light.

"Hardly," he said, clicking it off before she could see his face.

She wondered if he had thought of it on the spur of the moment, or if it was an old trick.

* * *

_December 31st, 1976_

Severus was up long before dawn; an old habit that lingered after following a school schedule for so many years, and from living down in a dungeon, where the walls grew so cold and damp you woke up from shivering. He dressed with the lights still off, and after penning a sightless note to Lily in the dark escaped the hotel to find a place with coffee, at the very least. As it happened, a tiny shop on the corner was already open, no doubt used to serving the rush of businessmen plodding to work in the dark of winter's pre-dawn.

He bought two cups of something hot and strong-smelling, and fresh pastries, took them back through the cold and up the creaking stairs that smelled of wet carpet. He found Lily sitting at the table in the wretched hotel room, her hair unbrushed and her eyes puffy, squinting over his note in the light that spilled down from the table lamp. She had opened the curtains, but the sky behind her was charcoal grey.

"The forecast for today is overcast and cold," he said, putting the coffee down in front of her, along with the white paper bag of pastries.

"Surprise, surprise." She smiled at him, not perfunctory but weak. She looked tired. He shouldn't have let her insist this place was fine, last night.

Or perhaps her fatigue came from what he was going to make her to do him.

Checkout time was eleven AM. Until then they stayed in the room that smelled no different from the stairwell, drinking the coffee and eating the pastries, because at least the room had a radiator, sputtering damp heat. Since he'd paid in full last night, Severus let Lily instruct him to leave the key on the room's table and simply walk out, past the bored boy not-so-surreptitiously reading a _Hustler_ behind the peeling front desk.

Outside the decrepit hotel, traffic on the streets was erratic; many people seemed to have the holiday off. Their bright faces and laughter and pleasant mania felt like a surreal contrast to Severus' state of mind, as if feelings inside his head were being reflected in grotesque and garish shapes on the people around him.

He kept a close eye on Lily, making sure she was never more than an arm's length away. If she had to stop to let a group of manic shoppers clomp by, he stopped on the other side. If she had to detour around a bicycle rack or a bus station or a traffic obstruction, he met her on the other side. He wouldn't instigate a touch, but she kept taking his hand, and he let her, even though it made the bright lights and sounds of London seem even more grotesquely vivid.

They wound back through the alleys of Brixton until they found the gap in the bricks that opened to the lot. It was deserted, as he'd thought. The sounds of human traffic didn't even filter back to it.

Not wanting to court the possibility of being spotted in the city, they had agreed to spend most of the day in the house. Severus didn't want Lily to curse him too early, just in case the spell went horribly wrong and she had to reverse it immediately . . . or in case it simply went horribly wrong. If this curse was Dumbledore's, and if even the Dark Lord had barely been able to undo it, he knew St. Mungo's Healers wouldn't have a chance of reversing it. All his hope had to rest on Lily.

He hoped he had managed not to communicate that fact to her. He was far better at shredding confidence than boosting it.

They were lucky it wasn't raining, since half of the white house's roof and upper floor had been ripped away, opening the house to the cold winter sky. As the Muggle weatherman on the coffee shop's television had predicted, New Year's Eve was overcast, turning everything in the house to monochrome. The floor he and Lily walked over was matted with white-gray sheetrock dust and debris, bird and rat droppings, shadows of old liquor stains and things even less sanitary.

The place made last night's hotel look like King Solomon's palace. It was good, he told himself, to visit these places with Lily. It would be a good reminder to him, when she went back to Potter, that this only was the sort of shit Severus could bring within her reach: Death Eater threats; miserable markers of human civilization; fatigue and despair; the force of having to do the last thing you wanted in order to survive.

He sensed that he should be locking her up rather than dragging her out into the open, forcing a wand into her hand, and ordering her to curse him. But she was not a child, and this was very unfortunately part of growing up. Lily had been married, she'd become a mother, she'd endured months of fear hiding away with her son; and now Severus was going to have to teach her a lesson he despised, perhaps most for its truth: there were times when all you could do was go on _because you had to_.

Either she would learn that lesson today, or she would balk and sit the fight out from then on. Severus didn't know which was his hope, or even which hope was more selfish.

Lily was wearing her green jumper today. While it made her look lovely, even with her hair dull and messy and her eyes bruised from lack of sleep, he hoped it wasn't going to be the last thing he ever saw. He was not as confident about this as he'd pretended to her. He kept remembering Avery, the way the Dark Lord had shrugged and said, " _Really, Severus, you do not think we should simply let him die? Is a man who falls to the curse of a Mudblood witch is worth saving?_ " But it was the simplest way to accomplish what they wanted; of that he was certain. The only emotion the Death Eaters and their applicants would feel for him after today was contempt. There would be no awkward questions, only disgust; they'd have no need for a wizard who could be so easily incapacitated by someone they barely allotted human status. And one thing you learned, after almost thirty years as a Slytherin and a spy, was that simple was always what you needed. Overthinking was an unproductive form of worry.

He and Lily sat on old crates probably dragged in by neighborhood boys who'd used this place long ago for drinking and literal pissing contests and smoking joints; but not even they had been here in a while, because the weeds were all untrammeled and the dust on the floor undisturbed. He and Lily nibbled at cold food they'd bought from Tesco on the way there, Severus forcing himself to eat it, because his body would probably need it to fight off the curse. He wondered if the curse would hurt him more than it had Avery. Was it more painful when your heart was already a morass of self-loathing, or did its power deepen with the desire of the caster to hurt you?

Lily spent most of the day trying to talk in a steady voice about Hogwarts, as if he'd agreed to go back there after all. He suspected she was doing it to force herself to believe in normalcy. The urge to dip into her mind and learn what she really thought, really felt, was strong, but he resisted it.

And anyway, he didn't want to see her thinking about the boy or James fucking Potter or the green light or himself in his Death Eater mask looking down on her in the burning field after he'd saved her from dying in agony.

Around half past three the sky began to darken as the sightless sun started to retreat, melting even the muted colors away until the world looked like a faded old Muggle photograph. Lily rustled around in her coat pocket and produced his empty pencil jar, perhaps to do her star lights—but then she handed the jar over to him.

"Go on," she said, her smile hard to see in the fading light, but bright in his memories. "Did you do them yet?"

Severus had, but he didn't want her to see them. " _It's the same branch as Patronus magic,_ " she'd said; so of course his stars had turned out to be the exact same as hers, a network of golden lights. He had never shown her his Patronus. He had a feeling the stars wouldn't give as much away as the silver doe, but he didn't want to take the chance, even if it was only the formation of her surprise.

"I haven't been able to do them," he lied. In fact, they had come easily, thinking of Lily beaming at him when he told her it was brilliant, of Lily in the glow of her stars, of her looking up from her violet stationery and saying, _Because you're my best friend._ "I was never as good as you at Charms."

Her face fell just a touch with disappointment, but he grabbed the urge to cast the spell and take her slight unhappiness away, and strangled it to death. It was better than her pity, her guilt, her one day saying, _Severus . . . you know me and James . . ._

She pulled out her wand and made the stars glow to life in the jar. Then she capped it and set it on the ground between them. For a while they were silent. At some point the crate she was sitting on had drifted close to him, so that her leg kept brushing his when she moved. Lily was a restless person.

"We should do it soon," he said, watching the stars swirl around each other in the jar.

"Can we wait a bit longer?" she asked in a tiny voice.

He could force her to curse him, he could make her spend a miserable night and day in two separate shit holes, he could even refuse to perform the charm she so hoped he would; but he had his limits, apparently, and it was that voice. So they waited.

At full dark, a light clicked on outside the house, across the lot. Lily went rigid. Severus got up quietly to peer out the half-naked window, its glass broken into jagged teeth; but it was only the floodlight, same as last night, an orange lamp high on a pole above the warehouses, turning the lot outside into a network of shadows.

Spying had given Severus an exacting internal chronometer, and one hour later he decided it was time. It was growing too cold out there, even with Lily's star-lights to warm them. Severus was pretty sure she had meant for them to be held close in to the body, and he would rather be hexed into madness than cast his own and show her the one thing he would never tell her.

Lily did not deny him, that time. She got up without a word, taking out her wand—but then she just stood there, looking at him in silence.

"All right," he said, crossing his arms tight across his chest, hoping he just looked like he was cold. "Repeat to me your instructions." God, he was treating her like a student. It didn't help that she _looked_ like one. It was going to be even worse if she managed to get him back at school.

"I'm to curse you, then Apparate with you to the alley out back of St. Mungo's," she recited, with an expression eloquent of her opinion of these instructions. "They're going to ask me what happened to you, but I'm to tell them I don't know, I didn't see who it was, and I didn't hear what he cast."

"And you're to stick to that, no matter what they say or threaten," he reminded her, hearing the sharpness in his voice. Apparently he couldn't help himself. "They will have no proof it was you, and without proof—"

"They can't do anything dreadful to me. I get it, Sev," she said, but her face and voice were troubled, not angry.

"And what else?" he said, to spur her along, before she lost her nerve.

"If they can't figure out how to negate it themselves, I'm to set off this—" She pulled out one of the ersatz Decoy Detonators he'd made before coming down here; a model off one of the wretched Weasley twins' products. In all fairness, they had been brilliant inventors . . . to anyone who hadn't suffered their wretched tomfoolery in a Potions classroom for seven years. Severus could never hear the names 'Fred' or 'George' or 'Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes' without a shudder of revulsion.

"—and block them out of your room and heal you myself."

"Correct," he said. When she'd told him the counter-curse— _Ignosco_ —he hadn't been able to restrain his disdain and loathing; but the guilty look on Lily's face had said she thought the same. " _I forgive_ "—that was very much the work of Albus Dumbledore, Severus had to admit: creating a curse that made you die of remorse, with a counter-curse of bloody forgiveness.

"Might as well get started," he said, letting no sign of his own loathing for this plan show through. "We don't want to be late."

Lily nodded. He wondered if she had looked like this when walking into battle. The closest thing he could compare to her expression was the one she'd worn the first morning of O.W.L.s, when he'd been afraid she was going to show everyone her breakfast in reverse.

They drifted apart, across the trash-spattered floorboards. Severus realized he was moving warily, as one expecting an attack. How fitting. Lily's every step was stiff, as if she were made of tin and her joints had rusted over.

She turned toward him, her jaw set, her face grim and determined. When she stretched out her arm, he could see it shaking across the room in the faded, moon-tinted light pouring in through the hole in the roof.

" _Contrapasso_ ," she called.

Nothing happened. Severus resisted the urge to do or say something insensitive.

"I think you have to want to do it a _bit_ ," he called back to her, apparently not able to resist hard enough.

Lily stared at him. He thought her hand on her wand tightened.

There was a long moment of silence; of nothing. He watched her across the room. Her wand arm was held out a bit from her body. A wind blew through a boarded-up hole behind her, slipping pieces of her hair into her eyes.

Then she raised her wand and pointed at him, as if she was aiming for his heart. He saw her lips move, but he didn't hear the curse, either because she had whispered it or because—

What he experienced was not pain; it was not anything so simple . . . it was the remorse he had felt at everything he had ever done that deserved it, so tightly compacted it hurt— everything he had hated himself for, everything he'd known he shouldn't have done; should have stopped, should have turned away from, should have stepped forward to do; shouldn't have thought, or felt, or believed, or wanted— The guilt, the compunction, the sorrow had always been there, at the back of his mind, in the bottom of his heart, but never fully acknowledged, always denied . . . but it could be denied no longer, and it was rising through him like a wildfire . . .

It happened in less than a moment, and yet he thought in some way it was slow, starting as a spark and then growing to consume him, scalding his veins, melting through his bones, flowing through his blood—

Somewhere in the distance, he thought he heard someone calling his name, sobbing.


	11. Chapter 11

St. Mungo's was loud, noisy, chaotic. It was infinitely worse than the ER of St. Joseph's, where she'd got her toes trodden on, an elbow in her side, and stood outside the room where Mr. Snape's body lay while Severus went inside to see it and left Lily in the hall with his silent, vacant mother.

St. Mungo's was worse because this time, Lily was waiting outside for Severus.

There was soot on her skin from a cloud of black smoke a sick boy had belched into her face. She felt damp and clammy and gritty, her fingers and toes like ice, her stomach twisting with that roiling feeling of being within a few thoughts of throwing up. She kept seeing Sev falling to his knees, on the other side of that horrible, weed-pitted house, his blank, Occluded face transforming as if someone had taken a loose thread of a tapestry and pulled—transforming to—

The door to his hospital room flew open and a young Healer with glasses rushed into the hall. He looked nothing like James. His head twisted around, searching for someone—he saw Lily; a look of relief blossomed over his worry, but didn't remove it completely—

She darted toward him before he could take a step, almost colliding with a woman being wheeled past with tree trunks for legs and a burning smell of sulfur.

"What?" Lily gasped, staggering to a stop in front of the Healer. "What is it?"

"Healer Jethries—" he started, wiping at his forehead.

"What did you do?" The main Healer, a woman with hair yanked back into a plaited bun, materialized at his side, looking harassed and angry and a bit wild about the eyes.

Lily thought of Severus clutching at her in the condemned house, his eyes sightless and unseeing, whispering a constant surge of words she knew would be confessions, his face anguished with remorse and pain—because it really did hurt: the uprising of guilt was transformed from an emotion to a physical sensation, and if you cast it strong enough . . . if they _felt_ guilty enough . . .

"I haven't done anything," she rasped. She thanked all the stars both conjured and eternal that these people didn't know her well enough to recognize _all_ her signs of lying. "I've just been standing out here, waiting for you to—"

"I mean the spell on this boy," Healer Jethries said angrily.

"What Healer Jethries means," Glasses Healer rushed in, "is that if there's anything you can tell us about the curse, anything at all—"

"I told you what I knew," Lily said, lying for all she was worth. Judging by the look on Healer Jethries' face, Lily was worth about two knuts.

"Perhaps you've—remembered something," Glasses Healer persisted. His huge eyes behind his lenses were imploring. They knew she'd cast it, of course they did. Lily wanted to tell them every detail of what she'd done, would have begged them to let her fix it, but Sev had been explicit, she couldn't do it, so much was riding on this—

"There's nothing to _remember_ because I don't _know_ ," she said, tears pricking her eyes.

"Come in here," Healer Jethries ordered, her voice tight with anger. She grabbed Lily by the arm and propelled her into Sev's room. The three other Healers rotating swiftly around one of the two beds and the gabble of their raised voices seemed to make the space tighter, almost claustrophobic. It was a double room, but one bed was empty, and the other held Severus—

Lily stopped as if she'd been nailed to the spot. When the Healers had wrestled him out of her hands, he'd been gasping, twitching, babbling in a low murmur, a progression from the stream of whispers and clutching in the broken house.

Now he was _writhing_ , his body straining upward off the mattress, his spine bowing in half as he tried to launch himself off the bed, because they had strapped him down, ropes around his wrists and all up his forearms; as she watched, another of the Healers sent a wide strap hissing around his chest, pinning him more fully down, and following with more across his thighs. And Severus' voice had risen as if he were trying to be heard across a loud room, pouring out a string of crimes—people who'd died because of something he'd said, something he'd brewed, something he'd thought up, something he'd cast—people she'd _known_ , she recognized their names—

One of the Healers waved his wand in a broad, sweeping gesture, throwing a net of pale white light over Severus' bed. It sizzled for a moment, like a firework burst falling through the air, and then dissipated, netting Severus in silence. But he continued to thrash against the bonds; his mouth continued to move, his eyes to stare sightless and terrified at the ceiling.

"Oh God," she whispered, feeling the cold sting of tears slipping down her face.

"You see now?" Healer Jethries demanded, her face red with anger. "You see what's happening? You see why I need you to _jog your memory_ and tell me what he was hit with?"

"Nothing bad will happen to you," Glasses Healer assured Lily hastily. "We just want to help him, all right, to make him better—everything strictly confidential—right, Healer Jethries?"

Healer Jethries' expression said she wanted to put Lily in Severus' place, but she only growled, "Complete confidentiality, _if_ you tell us what you did. If not—"

Lily couldn't speak; she couldn't even look at them. She couldn't look away from Sev. She put her hands over her mouth, but her tears just ran over her fingers.

"Do you not understand?" Healer Jethries was practically shouting at her. "This isn't just a spell to drive someone mad, it's putting a strain on his body, his heart, his _brain_ , it could even wreck his magical system if we can't figure out how to—"

The door swung in, hitting the wall behind it, and Severus' mother swept in.

Lily felt as if all her organs had been sucked out the bottom of her feet.

"Excuse me," Healer Jethries rounded on her, "this area is restrict . . . " Then she really looked at Mrs. Snape, with her long black hair, her face so like her son's. Mrs. Snape only stared back in silence, her expression eloquent of a thousand frozen insults.

"If it is restricted," she said in a voice as hard and cold as the London streets outside, "then what is this girl doing here?"

Her wand pointed at Lily, but Lily's feet were already nailed to the floor and her organs all vanished, so she felt nothing new, nothing at all.

Jethries turned her glare on Lily. "We're trying to get her to tell us what she did," the Healer snarled.

Mrs. Snape's eyes narrowed. " _You_ did this?" With her wand she pointed now at Severus, writhing against his bonds on the bed, his eyes frenzied, his face manic with anguished remorse.

Lily didn't say anything. She couldn't—

Mrs. Snape rounded on Jethries. "And you can't undo the simple spell of a schoolgirl?" she demanded in tones of incredulous contempt. "Am I to believe any hospital would staff half-wits so incompetent as that?"

"It's _not_ a simple spell," Jethries said, her hand tightening on her wand.

"Really? Am I then to believe some scrap of a sixth form girl has the power to cast a spell that a team of _trained Healers_ cannot identify or negate?"

Inside her own horror, Lily had to admit this was an excellent point.

"I—she—" Jethries floundered, and Lily did feel sorry for her. She was only doing her job, after all, and Lily _had_ done it; Lily _did_ know how to stop it (in theory, at least, and God, Sev had better be right about that); Lily _wasn't_ really just sixteen.

"She's clearly lying about _something_ ," Jethries exclaimed finally, her frustration coloring her voice.

"I'll get it out of her," said Mrs. Snape in a voice that made Lily think she would prefer Voldemort. Jethries opened her mouth to argue, but Mrs. Snape pointed her wand at the door to the room and said, "Go. Take your attendants with you. I will need to concentrate."

Jethries must have been in Gryffindor, Lily thought, because she didn't balk, even though she probably should have. "I can't just let you—"

"I am this boy's mother, and I wish for the Healers to leave him. Right now," Mrs. Snape said, her wand not lowering. "That is not a request you can refuse."

Jethries looked so frustrated, Lily knew Mrs. Snape had the right of it. One of the attendants whispered in Jethries' ear. Looking almost tearful with fury, Jethries choked, "We'll be back," and pushed with the rest of them out of the room. Before the door shut after her, she paused to give Mrs. Snape a look of loathing, the sort the woman probably received all the time. But Mrs. Snape was looking at Lily.

Hadn't Severus once told her his mum could read minds, too? Oh shit.

The door to the room shut. They were alone, just Severus going mad and Lily and his mother with her wand pointing at Lily again. Lily couldn't look away from it.

"You will tell me what you did," Severus' mother said, her voice low and poisonous, her eyes dangerous and solid as a wall of black iron a kilometer high and half again as thick. "Now."

Lily almost looked her in the eye, but at the last moment stared at the wand again. _She can't see inside my head, I can't let her._ She knew she could never manage lying to Severus' mum, so she had only one choice.

"I'm trying to save his life."

Mrs. Snape did not speak right away. "By doing _this_ to him?" she said, her tone full of the disbelief that Lily could really be that stupid. That _anyone_ could. That such stupidity could _exist_. Lily knew exactly how she felt.

"It was his idea," Lily said, hating everyone but Sev, who was just trying not to become a bloody Death Eater again. She stared down at him as he twisted against the restraints—she wondered if he was going to have bruises later—his eyes open and wild and unseeing, his lips moving as he continued to spew a litany of crimes beneath the healer's silencing spell.

"His idea," Mrs. Snape repeated in the same tone as before. "His idea to put himself in the hospital."

"His idea for me to put him in the hospital," Lily said, because apparently being married to the Marauders turned you into some sort of utter idiot. And it really did, because a second later Mrs. Snape's wand was at her throat. Lily hadn't thought anyone her age could move that fast. Against her will, her eyes flew to the woman's face, and she found herself being pulled into two black eyes, just like Severus', but emptier than his, even when he was Occluding, and she was falling down a dark tunnel, flashing past her own memories—James and a green light and laughter and Severus and Harry—

 _No_ , she thought, and there was a muffled bang and suddenly she was out of the tunnel, her eyes squeezed shut, clenching her hand on her chest as the feeling of warmth faded, as if she'd been holding Harry to her heart only a second ago and now he was gone—

The only sound in the room was the muffled creaking of the old metal bed frame as Severus twisted in his bonds.

"Where is it?" Mrs. Snape asked, in the strangest voice. Maybe it was only strange because it was coming from her, because it sounded a little like panic.

Lily opened her eyes. She had made Mrs. Snape stumble back from her; she stood a few steps away, her left hand pressed to her chest in a mirror of Lily's memory, her right still clenched around her wand. The hard, hateful emptiness had gone from her face; she looked Lily didn't know how, and was staring at her.

"Where's what?" Lily rasped. She felt as if she really had fallen about a hundred metres; windblown, her heart battered from racing.

"The baby," Mrs. Snape said.

Lily blinked. From the corner of her eye, she could see Severus twitching.

"The baby's gone," she said at last.

Mrs. Snape's body didn't move, but her eyes had started to flicker over Lily's face. Perhaps she was thinking there were different ways for babies to be gone, the way Mum had.

"I lost him," Lily said. "I'm not losing Severus."

If Lily had been expecting any outward reaction from his mother, she didn't get it. Mrs. Snape only stared at her, for one very long moment, while Lily's heart beat into the silence.

"Then you might want to avoid cursing him," she said at last. There was no trace of friendliness in her voice, but no crippling malice either; just cold unpleasantness.

Lily only nodded—but just a tiny bit.

"Are the Healers truly incompetent, or is the curse more impressive than you appear?"

"The curse is," Lily croaked.

Mrs. Snape's eyes bore into her. "Can you take it off?"

"I know the counter-curse."

"That isn't what I asked."

"I know," Lily said.

Something in Mrs. Snape's face changed, but not for the better. "Then cast it," she said, her voice like iron.

Lily pushed away from the wall and pulled out her wand. She took in a deep breath and held it, sinking inside herself to that place she always secretly imagined that her magic came from, as if it lived in a wellspring deep inside. She let it wash up into her arm, flowing down to the tip of her wand, and whispered, " _Ignosco_."

Nothing happened.

She stared at Sev still paralyzed in the grips of her fucking _forgiveness_ , and wanted to scream. But there was no voice in her; there was no thought. Just helplessness, despair and guilt, terrible, consuming guilt, as bad as the remorse the curse was choking him with—

"Well," said Mrs. Snape, absolutely cold. "It is too bad you didn't fail as miserably in the casting, nor manage to replicate your astounding success."

She grabbed hold of Lily's wrist, her thin fingers like claws, but did not turn her around; only kept her held rigidly in her grip. Her voice was a stinging whisper. "If my son lives, you are safe," she said. "But if he dies, you will wish I had never been born."

Then she whisked herself away, throwing open the door. "All right," Lily heard her barking to someone out in the hall, "you can come back in and try whatever ideas come into your heads, not that I expect many will."

The swinging door muffled Jethries' voice. "What did she tell you?" she demanded.

"If I had wanted you to know every detail of my conversation, I would have kept you in the room. Suffice it to say I was right: you'll not get anything decent out of her."

Mrs. Snape probably would have been disappointed to know that nothing she could say could make Lily feel worse as she stood next to Severus' bed, her mind filled with his anguished face, her heart full of her failure.

* * *

 

Lily leaned her head against the waiting-room wall, down the hall from Severus' room. She'd never heard so much racket inside a building, not even when Gryffindor had won the Quidditch Cup in fourth year and Sirius had let off a packet of flying fireworks that turned people into llamas when the pellets hit them. (In fact, she thought she _did_ hear the bleating of a llama in here.) Her dad had never wanted to work on New Years' Eve because of all the people who'd come in injured . . . it would figure wizards would have invented ways to injure themselves even _more_ horribly than Muggles knew how . . .

But it all felt faraway to her, as if she'd walked through a silencing spell and it now clung to her like a cobweb.

She opened her eyes, which was a mistake. For one thing, the walls of St. Mungo's were painted in a soothing mint green, but when the Healers dashed by in their lime-green gowns it made you nauseous. (Honestly, who'd thought that was a good combination to inflict upon four floors of sick people?) Something fluttered down onto Lily's sleeve: orange feathers; the woman sitting next to her had got her head transfigured into an orange flamingo's, somehow—a demented-looking orange flamingo, smelling like a petting zoo. A man across the room was regurgitating rainbow liquid into a bucket between his knees while a Healer stood over him, asking him questions in between hurls. And sitting next to him was Severus' mum.

She was staring at Lily.

This was a deeply unpleasant thing to endure, especially when you were surrounded by the victims of nasty jinxes . . . it made you wonder if she were getting ideas . . . but with one look at her eyes you _knew_ she had mastered spells that would make these look like a bunch of parlor tricks, and you'd be lucky to come off with a flamingo's head vomiting rainbows. Mrs. Snape had her wand out still, and she was pressing it idly against the tips of her fingers, her gaze never leaving Lily.

It was dead creepy. At the funeral, with that intricate lace veil falling down her back, her face as peaceful as death, she had looked unsettling in an almost performed way, like someone mad but harmless.

She did not look harmless now. Her dark, cruel, patient eyes said, _You are well for the present because I have decided you will not be otherwise . . . for the present._

Lily looked up at the clock. It was half past eleven PM. It was hours ago that she'd brought Sev in.

Mrs. Snape had stayed in Severus' room for a long time after ejecting Lily. Lily had trudged trance-like down the hall, watched by two men in orange uniforms with tiny badges that read SECURITY. Healer Jethries had spoken to them in a low voice, with lots of angry hand movements and a look at Lily that defied all Severus' assurances they couldn't do anything to her without proof.

But Severus had assured her she'd know what to do . . . he'd been confident that she could help him . . .

 _What a time to be so wrong._ The bitterness of disappointing him and failing him, in the same breath that she'd hurt him, made her throat ache. She shouldn't have let him talk her into it - never mind that Severus _radiated_ authority so well that it almost didn't occur to you to argue. But removed from the powerful influence of his sharp looks, his domineering voice, she thought: surely he could have taught her some other spell that would have kept him in the hospital for long enough to miss his meeting, to give him that solid alibi he insisted he needed. The Order's arsenal had mainly been defensive spells and counter-curses, and all right, all Stupefy took was an Ennervate, but surely Sev knew other spells . . . spells that would put him down for the count without _killing_ him . . .

For the first time it occurred to her to wonder why the bloody hell Dumbledore had invented this spell, let alone entreated them to use it. Light magic wasn't supposed to _do_ this . . . it was supposed to defend and heal and protect, not destroy somebody with their own remorse.

Someone cleared their throat at her elbow, like a sheep on a distant mountain-top. Glasses-Healer.

"Would you like something to eat?" he asked gently.

She didn't know why he was being nice to her. She deserved to be locked up, not offered sandwiches. Instead of answering, she asked, "How's Severus?"

Glasses-Healer hesitated. "He's holding on," he said at last, his voice still gentle. "But there's no telling how much longer . . . are you sure you don't want anything?"

 _I want to go 50 years into the past and murder Voldemort right the fuck now so this isn't necessary_. "No."

He left her. She returned to hating herself and feeling her skin try to crawl in any direction it could to get away from Mrs Snape's scrutiny. She was staring at Lily like an executioner observing the first criminal on her list, the one she had been waiting to get . . .

A part of Lily was waiting for Lucius Malfoy, or perhaps even Voldemort, to turn up in Spell Damage like Severus' mum had, but of course they hadn't. Since trying with the counter-curse and failing, she had been sitting in a waiting-room almost devoid of hope.

Lily shifted in her seat and the decoys Severus had given her clinked in her pocket. She had been waiting all evening to give it one last shot. She supposed she'd waited long enough.

Severus' five Healers had gone down to two, just Jethries and Glasses on constant watch, while the other three only reappeared occasionally when summoned. Right now, the young blonde had gone running off, disappearing out of the ward; Lily had been watching, and she knew the other two attendants were elsewhere. Jethries and Glasses would be all that was left in the room. She needed them out, although she could make do with ejecting just one, she supposed . . . But when the room got as empty as her plan required, she needed a moment to let off the decoy in the waiting-room. And the prospect of those two circumstances' intersecting was narrow . . .

If only Severus' mum weren't watching her like a Sphinx.

Lily flicked through and discarded possible plans to let the decoys loose. Severus had told her she needed only to drop them and they would totter off and explode, sending out clouds of smoke to assist you in disappearing. He'd made three of them; she had them all in her pockets. But she needed a moment when someone wasn't watching her in order to drop them. While her guards were only keeping a desultory eye on her after so many hours—one of them had wandered off to the tea-room, and the other had been roped into restraining a hysterical woman screaming about Davie's ears—there was still Mrs. Snape, the horrible, evil woman. Did she even blink?

Healer Jethries came rigidly out of Severus' room and walked like a tin soldier up to Mrs. Snape's chair. And Severus' mum _looked up at her for a second_ —

Lily slid the first decoy out of her pocket, clicked it on, and with a motion like she was scratching her leg, dropped it. Mrs. Snape had stood to talk to Jethries, but her attention snapped back to Lily; her eyes narrowed; had she seen Lily move? Probably, the old . . . _witch_. She was now speaking to Jethries, not taking her eyes off Lily, making her unable to drop the second decoy, but she clicked it on in her pocket anyway—Severus had said, in response to her question, they would only sting you if they went off in your hand . . .

There was a loud _bang_ from the left—but it wasn't the detonator. The hysterical woman had hexed the guard and a Healer, sprouting their faces with wild green onions, and a couple more Healers were rushing her, wands out—in her left-hand pocket, Lily clicked the third detonator—

 _BOOM_. The whole floor seemed to shake as the first decoy she'd dropped detonated at opposite end of the ward. Half the people in the waiting room whirled toward it, including Mrs. Snape and Jethries, as a cloud of charcoal smoke billowed down the hall, blotting out the lamps—and then a second, crackling _BOOM_ sounded as the cloud spread unfurling, little jets of fizzling red light shooting toward the waiting area in stabbing spirals. People screamed and dived for cover—

Lily lobbed the second detonator across the room. It landed in the bucket of rainbow vomit and exploded a second later, showering half the room with multicolored chunks and another cloud of smoke. Lily dropped the third detonator in the middle of the waiting area as she sprinted out of it, through the whirling smoke, past the crackling explosions like thunder and lightning toward Severus' room, diving to the side as Glasses Healer came hurtling out brandishing his wand, his glasses crooked like he'd stumbled.

When he stopped right in her way, she gave him a shove between the shoulder blades, towards the chaos, shot into the room and slammed the door between them. She hurtled a barrage of spells at the door, making it glow with the shield of her magic; she filled in the gaps around the doorframe with lead and transfigured two crossed beams of iron across the centre of the door, having learned it was better to transfigure weak substances into sturdy ones, rather than rely wholly on the strength of a locking spell—but she threw in a Colloportus for good measure. The physical blocks taken care of, she went to work on the sound: an Imperturbable, then a tapestry of silencing and privacy wards for good measure. The mass of spells glowed over the wood in a thick net of multicolored light, leaving spots on her vision.

She'd done it all in less than five seconds. It couldn't keep Voldemort out; she could only hope it would work on Snape's mum.

Then she turned to Severus and sliced apart the silencing spell over his bed.

". . . she was hanging above the table, she begged me to save her, but I couldn't, oh God, I didn't . . . "

"Sev?" she whispered as his voice poured out in one long tormented stream, so loud her ears felt bruised, as hoarse as if he'd been swallowing glass. She knelt next to his bed, her hand going for his.

At the touch of her hand his eyes bugged and he let out a strangled scream. Lily felt a hiss, smelled something burning, and snatched her hand away—there were now five blisters on the inside of his palm, the exact shape and size of her fingers.

She tasted vomit in the back of her throat and pressed her hand against her mouth.

"Lily?"

She saw through her tears that he was trying to focus on her. His expression was open, raw, desperate, so ravaged with despair that Lily gasped as something inside her echoed it, because emotion that strong _pulled_.

"I'm here, Sev." She hung onto the cold rail of the bed, not daring to touch him again. "I'm here."

His hands twitched in the bonds as if he wanted to touch her, his restrained body straining toward her, but he hardly seemed to realize he couldn't move. His gaze hung on her face as if nailed there.

"I hated him," he whispered. "The boy, your son, I hated him—"

Lily blinked. She sat in mute silence as Severus poured years' worth of transgressions into her ears, all centered around Harry: belittling him, needling him, trying to get him and his friends expelled, thrown off Quidditch teams, humiliating them in class; an endless parade of petty assaults. And at the core of it, a loathing so strong he felt it in his bones, it ate him up in the night, as strong as anything he had felt for the Marauders, anything he had ever felt for himself.

" . . . and it was me, the reason he came after you, the Dark Lord, the prophecy, the source, it was me, I told him, I didn't know it meant you, and then I begged him, but not for _him_ or the boy, only for you, to save you, to spare you, and he said he would, but I didn't believe, I was afraid it was a lie, I went to Dumbledore, and he said he would hide you if I gave him something in return—"

_Stand aside, you silly girl . . ._

Lily pressed her hand back to her mouth. She realized she was shaking all over.

Voldemort had come back and Severus had been a Death Eater again. He had watched people die again. He had given information that led to deaths in the Order. He had murdered Dumbledore. He had been Headmaster and watched Death Eaters torture the children in punishment for disobedience.

At the last, he told her what Dumbledore had kept from him all those seventeen years, about Harry. Harry had always been meant to die.

He told her that before the war was over a second time, he, Severus, died. He didn't know how it ended. He didn't know whether Harry was alive. He had tried to keep him safe, and he had failed.

Lily could hear a thudding in the background. Was that her mind, her heart?

Tears were dripping off her chin, rolling down her neck, probably splashing into her collar. She didn't care. She saw one fall through the air and land on the back of Severus' hand, where it shone golden for a moment, and then slipped down the side of his thumb and out of sight.

" . . . everything I did, I did for you, everything, and it wasn't enough, it has never undone what I wrought against you . . . "

Lily closed her eyes, still crying. The echo of Dumbledore's voice wound out of her past, filling her head.

" _Contrapasso is an interesting spell. I am sure you are familiar with the Cruciatus Curse, how it is strongest in the hands of those who wish to cause pain? Contrapasso is strongest when cast by those who wish to forgive . . ._ _But remember, Lily: we cannot truly forgive others until we learn to forgive ourselves._ "

They had been living like this for so long, she and Sev . . . all of them, cut apart by hatred and fear and suspicion. Severus . . . James and Sirius and Remus . . . the people who'd died, the ones who had lived, the ones who lived and should have died, the ones who'd died and should have lived . . .

Where was it going to end, this time? Was she once more going to press her child to her heart knowing she was about to die, her heart filled with everything she might have done or said or wished to take her away from that moment, to erase it; to return to the failures she had lived and right them?

She felt a gentle power, sweet and light, lifting out of that deep place inside where she always imagined her magic came from, even though she knew it didn't; light and sweet, like the morning after a storm so heavy, when the trees were soaked and broken and the earth sodden and bruised, and the sunlight was sweetest.

The counter-curse to Contrapasso wasn't really _ignosco_. She should have known.

"Severus," she said, her voice quite clear. The banging was stronger than ever now. Severus looked at her, he had been looking at her the whole time, without a trace of Occlumency. Dimly, she saw the straps holding him to the bed dissolving, the spells unraveling into nothingness.

She let that feeling of lightness fill her as she reached out and touched his face, the skin of her fingers cool, not burning. His hand closed over hers, his fingers wrapping around her wrist. She placed her other hand on his other cheek, the soft, damp strands of his hair sliding over her fingers. His eyes met hers, dark and somehow eternal.

"I forgive you," she said, and she meant it with every part of her.

Severus did not move. Then he gasped, and Lily felt her hair flutter in a breeze as the curse lifted, literally, for a moment coalescing as a net of molten starlight, and then exploding, filling her eyes with tiny dots of silver.

Then the door to the hospital room shattered inward, blowing in splinters across the room. A team of Healers came tearing in, wands out.

"What in the hell is the matter with you?" Severus snarled at them, swaying upright, now free from his restraints. Lily grabbed his shoulder to keep him from toppling face-first onto the bedside rails. "Is that how you enter the room of an invalid?"

"What—" Healer Jethries stared, her mouth hanging open. "What—"

Severus managed a pretty nasty sneer. Of course, on him it was only a shadow of the real thing, but Jethries wouldn't know what his sneers looked like at their prime.

"Pathetic," said Severus. Then, perhaps noticing the looks of mingled alarm and suspicion the healing team was peppering at Lily, he added, "If any of you addled nitwits or any law enforcement fathead lays a finger on Lily, I will do things to you with a Probity Probe that you've only _dreamed_ of performing on patients."

And then he passed out. Lily sagged halfway onto the bed from the pressure of his weight. A couple of male healers had to rush to her and Sev's rescue.

"What did you do?" Jethries asked, staring at Severus' unconscious face as the Healers maneuvered him into a decent sleeping position. "What did you _do_?"

"What's it look like?" Lily asked. She felt exhausted. Her head throbbed, the way it did when she had been working on the creation of a new spell or the breaking of a really difficult one. But this one had felt simple, once she'd understood what it took . . .

"It looks like you lifted the curse you cast," Jethries said stubbornly.

"And now you can heal him." Lily felt utterly weary.

"Yes, well," Jethries said, scowling at her, clearly wishing she was also a member of the MLE so she could throw Lily into Azkaban and, while she was at it, do something unmentionable to her with a Probity Probe. The look was turned on Severus next, lying slack against the thin pillow. "Now you can get out of here and let me do my job."

"It is not her job to instill you with competence," said Mrs. Snape from somewhere behind Lily. Directly behind her, in fact. The skin of Lily's spine crawled. It positively writhed when the tip of Mrs. Snape's wand descended gently to her shoulder. "Come with me," she said. "We will let the healers attempt to demonstrate their skills in _some_ manner."

Lily snatched one last desperate look at Sev, but he was out cold. His face was exhausted. It was her imagination, surely, but thought she could see the shadow of his thirty-eight-year-old self on his teenage face.

Feeling as if she were walking to the gallows, just shy enough of being too tired to care, Lily followed Mrs. Snape out of Sev's room, into the halls of St. Mungo's. The air hung with dissipated clouds of black smoke, and everyone looked frazzled and sooty, but unharmed. Chairs had been knocked askew in the waiting area; the clock on the wall must have fallen off, because it was now hanging upside down. It read ten minutes to midnight. Had she only been in there with Severus for twenty minutes?

It had seemed like twenty years.

Mrs. Snape pivoted to face her so suddenly that Lily almost walked into her. She staggered backward so as not to step on the hem of Mrs. Snape's gown and bumped into a parked cart of empty potions vials.

"So you managed to undo it," Mrs. Snape said, in the sort of tone she might have welcomed a thief who'd come in her kitchen window.

"I didn't do it for you," Lily muttered.

To her tired astonishment, Mrs. Snape smiled—or something like it; a thin expression that made you feel unpleasant, instead of making you want to smile back. But all she said was, "Well, now you may go home. Severus needs to rest."

Lily blinked. Her eyes felt grainy. "I'm not going home."

"Aren't you? How strange; I thought it didn't matter what you _wanted_ to do _._ Do you even have permission from your parents to be here? I didn't think so," Mrs. Snape said, barely waiting for Lily's expression to register the truth.

"I'm not old enough to Apparate," Lily lied, knowing as she did that she was wasting her breath.

"That is hardly my concern. Get home however you got here."

"The trains aren't going to be running."

"Then sleep in the gutter, or under a bridge," Mrs. Snape said, sweeping around Lily, heading back for Sev's hospital room.

Lily opened her mouth angrily, probably to say something Mrs. Snape was going to make her regret—but as she turned, a sight at the end of the now-dingy corridor made all the blood drain out of her face.

"Sirius, you berk, this _is_ the right floor, bring him back in here—"

"No it's not, Moony, which you'd know if you could bloody well read—"

Lily dropped like a flash, hoping Mrs. Snape's body would hide her from view, making to duck behind the potions cart—except some wretched excuse for a human being had wheeled it away. She shot a terrified glance at the ward door, seeing the back of Remus' head as he argued with Sirius, whose shoulder and dark hair were just visible around the door frame. She dived underneath a set of upright waiting-room chairs, praying Sirius or Remus hadn't seen her—or James, because that's who was leaning on Sirius, she knew—

"This is the fourth floor," Remus was saying, "Spell Damage. Look at the whopping great bloody sign if you don't believe me, your esteemed highness—"

"Oh, sod, it is, isn't it?" Sirius said. "Sorry, Moony—come on, Prongs, let's get you fixing—"

A few moments later Lily saw fully why they were there: James' head had been badly transfigured halfway into a flowery teapot. He had a spout where his mouth should be, and handles for ears, and at the moment he was emitting a high-pitched whine with a shoot of steam. Lily put her hands over her mouth, not knowing whether she wanted to laugh or cry. She couldn't believe this was the first time she was seeing them, like this of all ways—there of all places, _now_ of all times—

She saw Mrs. Snape looking up and down the hall, clearly wondering where Lily had gone. There was a line between her eyebrows, as if she hadn't expected it to be that easy. Lily wondered if she could just sleep under these chairs. She was tired enough to. Her eyes felt swollen to twice their normal size and filled with grit.

"Someone's done a number on this place," she heard Sirius say approvingly; the next moment his feet were going past her hiding place, close enough for her to touch. He and Remus seemed to be dragging James, judging by the way his feet struggled between theirs, as if unable to walk properly.

Peeking out, she saw Remus and Sirius manhandling James through the havoc Sev's decoys had wreaked on the waiting-room. Behind the welcoming desk, several attendants scrambled around, waving clipboards and half-shouting at each other, spelling papers through the air. Sirius propped James against the counter, and Remus grabbed him to keep him upright; the teapot appeared to be too heavy for his body and was overbalancing him.

"Oy there," Sirius called into the melee, leaning over the desk to grab a Healer by the sleeve of her robes, "my mate's been hexed halfway to a tea kettle, can you sort him out?"

Lily didn't hear the rest, because at that moment Healer Jethries swept out of Severus' hospital room, saying in a harassed voice, "Where's that girl gone? That stupid boy is raving, wondering where she's—"

" _What_ did you call my son?" Mrs. Snape asked in a tone that should have turned Jethries to stone.

"I—where's the girl?" Jethries was flushed; she looked within about two seconds of company with Severus and his mother from renouncing her Hippocratic oath. "We can't calm him down, he's wrecking the room—"

 _Bugger it_ , Lily thought. She scrambled out from beneath the chairs and shot past Mrs. Snape and Jethries, hoping it was just her anxious imagination and not reality that she heard Sirius say, "Moony, was that _Evans_?"

"Here I am!" Lily gasped, skidding to a stop beside Severus' bed. She didn't know what he'd been doing, but a couple of Healers were lying dazed on the floor, the window was cracked, the paintings crooked, their frazzled occupants trying not to slide out of the frame. A mess of ruined potions lay in the detritus of smashed glass on the floor around the bed. Severus was white as death, his eyes hollow, his hair soaked with sweat. He was shaking.

"What have you been _doing_?" Lily asked, gaping.

He said, in a tolerable imitation of normalcy, "All they had to do was find you when I asked."

"What did you cast to lift the curse?" Jethries demanded, stalking around to the opposite side of Severus' bed, her hands on her hips, wand jutting up into the air.

"The counter-curse," Lily said, blinking.

"The counter-curse!" Jethries repeated in a way that would have sounded admirably mocking had she not been competing with Severus and his mum. "It's an awful funny curse whose cure is as bad as the hex!"

"Why?" Lily asked, a new terror seizing her heart. She stared at Sev in anguish, but he only looked back, his eyes glittering their strongest yet. "What's wrong? What do you feel? How bad is it?"

"I wouldn't take their word at anything," Mrs. Snape interrupted with cold malice. "The magic of two adolescents confounds them."

"Mrs. Snape," Jethries managed, her voice shaking with the effort of controlling herself, "I _am_ a Healer, and I do have _some_ experience at spell damage—"

"Then you must have left it at home this morning," said Mrs. Snape, patently unimpressed.

"He _destroyed_ the room! Just because _she_ wasn't in it!" Jethries stabbed her wand at Lily. "He's going mad, and I want to know what she _did_!"

"She healed me, you daft bint," Severus said. Jethries' eyes bulged with fury. Lily didn't know what to say to make this all better. Maybe because there wasn't anything.

"Sev, please," she whispered, wringing her hands, worried Jethries would snap and kill the lot of them. Severus shut right up, almost as silent as if he was holding his breath, and just returned to looking at her.

"Let us think of the solution," Mrs. Snape said, "rather than the problem. If Severus is calm enough when the girl is here, then let her stay. It's more help than you lot seem able to give him otherwise."

"That is _it_!" Jethries screamed. " _IT_! Maulkin, this is yours now! I quit!"

And she blasted the door out of her way and stormed out. Lily and the other Healers stared at the formerly repaired door, now hanging punch-drunk off its hinges. Outside, unseen in the hall, something crashed.

Mrs. Snape waved her wand at the door in a silent figure eight motion and it righted itself, pulling back onto its hinges, the splinters in its wood re-knitting. It swung home to its frame with a gentle _thwump_. Then she raised her eyebrows faintly at the remaining three Healers, whose expressions suggested they had just been closed into a room with a cobra.

"I hope some of you are able to perform better under pressure than that," she said with soft malice. At another broad, circular wave of her wand, the crack in the window snaked back on itself and disappeared; the picture frames tipped upright on the wall, sending their occupants rolling; and the spilled potions on the floor vanished, their vials reforming with tiny _pings_ and lifting through the air to settle, empty now, on the table.

"There," Mrs. Snape said, in a way that made Lily feel horrible on the Healers' behalf. But she didn't dare say anything. "Now you may attempt to do the jobs you have trained for."

Mrs. Snape tapped Lily on the arm with her wand and pointed it at two visitors' chairs to one side of the bed. Lily didn't want to put her back at that woman's wand, but she didn't have much choice. All she could hope was that Mrs. Snape wouldn't kill her as long as everyone believed Severus' continued health was riding on her presence.

Lily perched on a rickety chair with a seat made of wicker fraying out of its weave. Severus watched her move to it and sit, his eyes never leaving her. It made her nervous, like she was about to perform in a play everyone expected to be a hit. She tried a smile, wondering how twitchy it looked.

With a kind of muted grace Mrs. Snape sat in the other chair, a more decent one padded and upholstered in faded burgundy cloth. She did not acknowledge Lily or any of the Healers as they puttered about like three people trying to seem very unobtrusive. She only stared at a spot on the baseboard, her left hand folded over her right wrist on her knee. She was still holding her wand.

Severus only kept watching Lily. She wanted to talk to him, but not with his mother and three Healers around. She wanted to ask him if he thought he was really still under the effects of her curse, because Dumbledore had never said anything about that. He had only told her, in his tranquil way, that the counter-curse was, "'I forgive.'" Lily should have _known_ the spell wasn't as straightforward as she'd thought . . . but why hadn't Dumbledore told her? Sev could have died—anyone could have, if she'd cast it right, because what were the odds that you would cast that on someone, hear every horrible thing they had ever done, and then really, truly forgive them?

If she hadn't figured it out . . . if she'd had even a shred of resentment in her heart at the end . . .

Something made her glance up, a kind of prickle on her skin, into Mrs. Snape's dark, impenetrable eyes. Lily snatched her gaze away before she could fall again into that tunnel of memories.

"What is that?" Severus said, looking at the bright blue potion the Healer was holding out as though he'd been offered still-bloody human liver.

"A Calming Draught," the Healer warbled, sweating. She looked barely graduated from her training.

Severus seemed about to say something that would flay her self-confidence to the bone, but in the end he didn't. "I don't need it."

"But—but, er, sir—" She gave the in-charge Healer a pleading look.

"It won't do any good," Severus said. "The valerian was probably too dry when it was added. It will not calm me, only make me groggy and semi-disoriented."

The young Healer sent a look of round-eyed, mute appeal at her superior. "You can't know that, son," the man said, trying for reasonable and friendly.

"Yes he can," Lily said sharply, annoyed even though she knew the Healer's reaction was natural. "And he can not take his medicine if he wants."

"We'll leave it here in case you change your mind," the Healer said, nodding at his assistant. She put it down hastily on the table and flitted back to his side, probably to get away from Severus and his terrible visitors.

"You can go, Doris," the in-charge Healer said, scrawling with a short, trimmed-down quill on a parchment, "and get another round of the standards."

Doris ran out of the room with an expression that suggested she'd just been told someone else was meant to take her place in front of the firing squad.

"Will he be all right?" Lily asked the main Healer, who was now waving his wand over Severus while his quill tapped out notes on the floating clipboard.

"We hope so," he said, not bothering to look up from the net of spells he had drawn over Severus. They glowed in red and blue and gold, their shapes reminding Lily of diagrams she had seen of DNA structures. "Right now, young lady, I need to work. If you'll lie back, son," he said. He went to put his hand on Severus' shoulder, but Severus gave him such a look that he stopped dead.

"If you'll lie back," he repeated, maintaining his calm. Severus did, his attention returning fully to Lily.

In a flash of rare insight, she wondered if _he_ was wondering how much he'd told her . . . how much she'd heard . . . and what she had thought. She smiled at him, but his expression didn't change.

She wished these stupid Healers would hurry up and fix him.

"Everything's okay, Sev," she said, wanting to move her horrible wicker chair closer to him, but not with his mother there. She didn't want the Healers to throw her out, either. "Everything's going to be okay."

Severus' breath seemed to hitch for a moment, but he didn't say anything; only kept looking at her. Lily forgot about the Healers, his mother, the expanse of linoleum between her and his hospital bed, even James and Sirius and Remus out in the ward, and just sat with him, in the first hour of the new year.


	12. Chapter 12

_January 1, 1977_

When Lily swam up from dreams, she had no idea where she was. Or what had happened to her while she was asleep, because she ached all over. Her head especially, but all her body, as though she were coming through a nasty bout of flu or waking up after a toss down some stone steps. Her clothes stuck to her, clammy with sweat.

She moaned, a weak, thready noise, because she had no energy for more. Maybe if she just lay there she would pass back into sleep . . . or she wouldn't hurt any worse . . .

Someone moved above her; she heard the creak of the floor, recognized the way the air changed. "Mum?" she rasped, but she knew it couldn't be her mother, because there was no scent of oranges and gardenias enfolding her. But she didn't smell Severus either, the mothballs and cabbage, or Petunia's baby powder, only dust, like old rooms shut for too long. So who . . . ?

She squinted her eyes open. The light was murky, a sort of greenish grey, like being trapped in the bottom of a fish tank. A dark shape was shifting away from her, one she didn't recognize. She hoped it wasn't Lucius Malfoy, there to take his fury out on her for being stood up. Where in God's name was she?

"Are you in pain?" asked a cool, unpleasantly familiar voice that hit Lily like a cold breeze of dread. It was Sev's _mum_.

Now she remembered . . . when the Healers had ejected them around two in the morning, Mrs. Snape had brought them to a narrow cobblestone street in London, past the doors of a tiny inn crammed into a block of dark stone buildings on the deserted lane. Lily's skin had crawled at the idea of sleeping in the same room as that woman . . . vulnerable, unable to defend herself . . . but apparently her determination to stay awake had abandoned her in the night, leaving this feeling of being kicked down the stairs. More than likely Mrs. Snape had hexed her as soon as she'd fallen asleep.

This was probably the worse winter holiday she'd _ever_ had.

"Did someone kick me down the stairs last night?" Lily croaked.

"Perhaps it is the effects of your lovely curse on my son," Mrs. Snape said, as one only answering an inane question out of politeness. "Or perhaps you picked something up at St. Mungo's—a fragile system is easily overcome."

Lily pushed herself up to sitting; or slumping against her headboard and pillows. The room was tiny, dark, cold and cramped, better than the place in Camden where she and Sev had spent the night, but like a Victorian version only one scale better. The furniture was all made of snarled, dark wood, chipped and battered, and the room's single grimy window was covered with streaks of soap, obscuring any view of the outside. The greenish tint came from the gossamer curtain pulled just to one side of the soaped-up glass.

Mrs. Snape was sitting in an arm-chair in front of the window, next to the tiny fireplace whose fire was even smaller. It looked as battered as Lily felt. That smell and presence of old dust hung in the air, literally; she could see the thick motes drifting in the greenish light.

"Where are we?" Her throat ached when she spoke, and her head told her to shut up and lie back down.

"Grainthorpe Alley, London."

Mrs. Snape's wand was in her right hand, a chipped teacup in her left. A tarnished silver tray sat on a spindly table at her elbow, host to a dented teapot, a little dish of lemons, and a plate of plain bread. Mrs. Snape pointed her wand at the tray, rather negligently, and the teapot hoisted itself into the air, pouring a thin stream of sepia liquid into a second cup.

"Do you take lemon?" she asked in such a bored voice that it took Lily two seconds to realize she was being asked.

"Oh—erm, no . . . thank you."

Mrs. Snape flicked her wrist and the teacup sailed across the open space to Lily, who cupped it in her hands and drank it down, even though it tasted bitter as anything.

"How far are we from St. Mungo's?" Lily asked, since Mrs. Snape didn't seem inclined to offer anything in the way of conversation. In fact, she was just sitting back in her chair, her wand hand lying quiescent on her armrest, the other supporting her teacup as she stared into the struggling fire.

She didn't even bother to look up at Lily's question. "A witch is always only an Apparition point away."

Well, if she was going to be so unhelpful, Lily would find things out for herself. She spotted a skinny grandfather clock crammed into the corner, but both of the hands were hanging drunkenly around the six. _Defeated_ , she thought. "What time is it?"

"A little past seven. I wish to visit Severus. If you feel capable of getting up, you may come with me. If you only wish to lie in bed nursing your aches and feeling sorry for yourself, you may do that as well." She drained her teacup and set it on the tarnished tray, while Lily tried to quell the indignation that anybody could return such unpleasant answers to simple questions.

"I can get up," Lily said coldly. She wished she didn't feel so relieved that Mrs. Snape seemed to think it a remark worthy of ignoring; she didn't want to get hexed. Again.

But when she stood up from the bed, she wasn't so sure she _did_ feel capable enough. The whole room swung around like it was playing on a maypole. She grabbed for something to hold her up and found herself sliding onto the bed, then off it, to the floor—

Something caught her—not hands, but magic, the grip of a spell, but it was cold and impersonal, like dense fog. It nudged her back up onto the bed, where she managed to prop herself up. "Urgh," she groaned, shutting her eyes, because the see-sawing motion of the room was having the same effect as St. Mungo's mint walls and lime-green robes of its staff. "Dammit."

Mrs. Snape sighed. "I suppose I shall have to take you with me," she said, the way one might say _And then I found frog spawn in my bouillabaisse_. "Perhaps those Healers will have developed the intellect of an ass and manage to diagnose whatever's the matter with you."

Lily felt herself being lifted off the bed, by hands this time, one on the other side of her waist, another gripping her arm. That was good, because Lily needed to keep her eyes shut to avoid the way the surroundings whirled, although she showed a tendency to walk into doors no matter whether her eyes were open or shut. Mrs. Snape's cold, dry touch made Lily feel like something on her skin needed brushing off.

Mrs. Snape steered her down a hall with warped floor-boards, which did nothing to improve Lily's avoidance of doors. It was like walking as a giant across a rolling sea turned solid. The stairs were even worse. They were as extremely steep as the stairwell was severely narrow, so that Mrs. Snape had to walk ahead, gripping Lily by the left hand as she groped her way down the banister.

"What _did_ you cast yesterday?" Sev's mum asked, somehow making her bafflement into an insult.

"It's called Contrapasso," Lily said, squinting as she tried to find the next step. It didn't help that the stairwell was as dark as it was steep and narrow; she couldn't see where it ended.

"Contrapasso? And the counter-curse is _'I forgive'_?" She sounded as revolted by the idea as Severus had.

Almost at the bottom. Lily was desperate to get there; Mrs. Snape's grip on her hand was probably bruising it.

Lily staggered off the last step, and Mrs. Snape steered her into a more open space; Lily could tell when the quality of the air changed.

"Mrs. Snape," said a snuffling voice to the left; Lily squinted through dingy dimness and made out a check-in desk with a blotchy shape behind it. "A happy New Year to you. I hope you slept well."

"Quite well, thank you," said Severus' mum in a tone of barren civility. "Please hold the room for the night, Clarkson; I will be returning."

"Of course, m'um."

Mrs. Snape hauled Lily through the claustrophobic foyer and out onto the street, where the chilly air bit at Lily's face. Even though it hadn't been warm in that place, the air had been somehow stuffy. She hoped they were going to Apparate right away, though; she didn't want to stagger down icy cobblestones when she couldn't see where to put her feet. Seven in the morning—the sun wasn't even up yet. Everything would be gray—the buildings, the ground, the sky, the people.

"This w—" Mrs. Snape turned her to left, and then she stopped: stopped talking, stopped moving. Lily peered forward, saw a glint of white-gold and black, and opened her eyes all the way, even though the movement stabbed needles into her eyes—or maybe the stabbing didn't have to do with the light, but with the sight of the man standing on the cobblestones in front of them, close enough to touch.

Lucius Malfoy.

"Mrs. Snape," said Malfoy. Lily thought he looked as surprised to see them as they were to see him. Well, _Lily_ was—actually she was shocked and disturbed, but she didn't know about Sev's mum. But from the way she'd stopped dead and renewed her bruising of Lily's arms, she felt just the same.

When Mrs. Snape spoke, though, Lily heard nothing apart from mild surprise. "Mr. Malfoy," she said, with more civility than she'd shown to Clarkson, but still not an effusion. "A happy New Year. I trust you are well?"

"Perfectly well, I thank you," said Malfoy, with the same tablespoon's helping of politeness. Merlin, was this what pure-bloods were like to each other? Lily would take James' and Sirius' dirty Christmas carols, flaming curtains and teapot-heads any day.

Then he asked what Lily was dreading but knowing he would: "Is Severus with you?"

Lily had been forced to mostly shut her eyes again, so she couldn't tell how he was looking at her—if he was at all—but with her eyes closed she could hear his voice all the better, crawling in her ears like lice. It had many of the same qualities as Mrs. Snape's but it was worse, somehow—not more practiced, or more terrifying, but far more dreadful from what it could mean for Sev . . .

"I do very much need to talk to him about something, you understand . . . a little matter between old friends."

Had he been out _all night_ _looking_ for Sev? _Oh shit . . ._

"Severus is in hospital," said Mrs. Snape, her voice maintaining that polite distance, but her grip on Lily was as painful as ever. What did Mrs. Snape have to fear from Lucius Malfoy? Had Sev told her about the plan? Lily couldn't think of when he'd had the moment . . . had his mother seen it in their minds?

"If it's urgent," Mrs. Snape said, "you may send a message with me, I suppose . . . "

There was the tiniest pause. "I was hoping I might see him," said Malfoy, calm and smooth, quite polished. Lily wanted to smash her foot into his face. _I bet you're hoping, I just bet . . ._ Oh, she'd hit him with Contrapasso and let it eat him alive . . .

"I am afraid that is out of the question, Mr. Malfoy," said Mrs. Snape, still delicately civil. "He is quite unwell. He and this one had something of a quarrel . . . " She gripped Lily's shoulder for a moment. " . . . and, well, Gryffindors aren't known for their mercy, are they, Miss Evans?"

Lily blinked her eyes open again at the shock of Mrs. Snape's not only knowing her name but using it. "I don't think any of the four Houses were founded on mercy," she croaked.

" _You_ hurt Severus?" She could hear the sneer in Malfoy's voice. She desperately hoped he was thinking how stupid he'd been ever to recommend Sev to Voldemort. "Why am I not surprised. What's the matter with her?" he asked Mrs. Snape, much of his politeness evaporated, though who was the object of his rising contempt—Lily, Sev, or Mrs. Snape—Lily didn't know.

"Hopefully St. Mungo's will exhibit hitherto unsuspected powers of competence and be able to find out," said Mrs. Snape. Was that a note of winding-down-the-conversation in her voice? Please God let it be. "Severus seems to have hit her with something that manifests slowly but unpleasantly . . . I should think _most_ unpleasantly, given enough time. I will tell Severus you asked after him, Mr. Malfoy. Please give my compliments to your wife, and safe journeys throughout the New Year."

"Of course," said Malfoy, after another moment's pause, smooth and civil again. "Safety to yourself as well. Do tell Severus to . . . drop me a note when he's recovered."

A crack of displaced air, a rush of dry wind against her face, and Lily knew he had gone.

Within another second, she felt the familiar, squeezing pressure of Disapparition as Mrs. Snape whisked her out of Grainthorpe Alley, through space and time to St. Mungo's.

Lily's awakening felt like breaking the surface of water after nearly drowning. She gasped, reaching up to bat at the air, trying to tell her body she wasn't in water; she was dry, warm, in a dim room, but her body didn't want to listen; her heart was racing, as if wanting to beat its way out of her chest—

"Shh . . . " The voice was familiar, wonderfully, blessedly familiar; she reached out for it, and found what she wanted: a hand taking hers, another gently massaging her fingers, her wrist, as she clutched hold. "Shh, it's all right, you're safe."

"I know," she whispered, groping up the arm attached to the wonderful hands, trying to pull the body toward her—it was warm, lovely, familiar, safe. "You're here, I know—"

She managed to pull the body down onto the bed next to her and wrap her arms around it, to keep it from getting away. She couldn't think of who it was, but that wasn't important, because she knew it was exactly who she wanted, who she needed. She moved her head over the chest until she could hear the muffled thuds of the heart . . . and then she finally began to relax, the terror melting away, even the frenzied relief, winding down into contentment, into rest . . .

She didn't know how long she lay like that. It felt like a long time, or maybe she fell back asleep. Slowly she came back to lucidity, brought back, perhaps, by the sound of a heart beating as fast as a hummingbird's beneath her ear. She lay with her eyes shut, listening to it, putting the thrum together with the shallow breaths above her head that gently stirred her hair. She let her eyes open just a bit, seeing a dark dressing-gown, a dim room that looked like it belonged in a hospital, a dark window . . . it always seemed to be dark, in the winter . . .

Then her position hit her with the suddenness of a shout: She was lying in a hospital bed half on top of Severus.

She sat up as if someone had hexed her upright, her eyes flying to his, probably comically wide. Severus' eyes weren't: they looked back at her quite normally, as if she'd been doing nothing weird at all . . . but she remembered the hummingbird beat of his heart.

"Hi," she said, her voice coming out bright and awkward. Did they have to make these hospital beds so narrow? Her hip was pushed up against his, and the way she'd been lying, she had her left leg thrown over his—her _bare_ leg, because some pervert had put her in a hospital gown, and thank _God_ St. Mungo's gowns tied on the side. Even now she was half propped up on her arm, sort of leaning over him, her hair trailing onto his shoulder. If she rolled away, she'd crash to the floor.

"You seem better, then," said Sev, as if there were no hip-pressing, leg-throwing, or hair-lying-on-shouldering. She wanted to kiss him in gratitude, but didn't, for reasons very obvious.

Without knocking either of them to the floor, he brilliantly managed to slither out of the horrible, awkward position she'd chucked them into, and slide back into the chair beside her bed. He had thrown on a dark green dressing-gown over ugly St. Mungo's hospital robes, which were sage rather than lime green. What was with the color scheme of this stupid place? As soon as she got home, she'd throw away every piece of green in her wardrobe.

"You are better?" Sev asked her, as if for confirmation, tucking his dressing-gown around him. Perhaps her silence was worrying him, but she felt perfectly well again, if moronic.

"I feel fine," she said, trying to assume a normal position on the bed and slide her bare leg back inside its gown, where it belonged. "What was wrong with me, did they say?"

"They couldn't say for certain," Severus said, his opinion of St. Mungo's staff intelligence tinting his voice. It sounded very similar to his mother's. "But they believe it was backlash from the curse you cast."

"I guess it didn't help that I passed out Apparating here. Didn't I?" She could feel herself frowning. "I don't remember arriving . . . "

"You did. My mother said you were having difficulty maintaining balance, and that you expressed experiencing pain."

He paused. Something about his silence made Lily think he had something to say that he didn't want to.

She was so glad she could see properly again. She studied his face, thinking it looked more open than it had yesterday, before the curse. "What?" she asked, curling her legs up so she could sit against the headboard, after surreptitiously checking that her ugly green gown didn't gape. "What is it? You don't think they're right, do you?"

He still hesitated, but then said, staring down the bed at her toes, "Can you describe your symptoms to me? As fully as you can recollect."

Grimacing, she rubbed at her eyes. "Like I'd fallen down the stairs or caught a bad flu. I just . . . hurt. Then I tried to stand up and I couldn't, everything was tilting everywhere. And light hurt my eyes, and trying to look at anything made me dizzy."

Now Severus' silent hesitation was practically audible.

"Sev, what is it? You can tell me." She made herself go on. "If something bad is going to happen to me—"

"No, nothing like—"

He didn't seem to want to look at her; his eyes kept darting away. She thought he was nervous of her reaction. She tried to make her expression as open and encouraging as possible.

"Nothing bad will happen to you," he said quietly. "I only . . . the effect you describe . . . there is only one branch of magic that results in a backlash appropriate to the power of the spell you cast."

Confused, Lily waited. The tone of his voice, even the way he was searching her face now, suggested he expected her to follow him, but she didn't. "Sev, what do you mean?"

He was silent for several long moments. Her stomach was starting to wrinkle with nervousness . . .

"That is the pattern associated with the Dark Arts," he said, like one getting out something difficult so they could get on with preparing for the explosion.

Her mouth fell open. "Wh—I never used the Dark Arts! I wouldn't! How could you—"

"Are you quite sure Contrapasso is not Dark?" he asked, his tone so reasonable she almost didn't feel angry, frightened, vaguely ill—

"Of course it's not! _Dumbledore_ was the one who made it up, he taught it to me! He'd never teach me anything like . . . "

_In the way the Cruciatus Curse is strongest in the hands of those who wish to cause pain, Contrapasso is strongest when cast by those who wish to forgive . . ._

"Lily." Severus was speaking in a patient, rational tone. "The Dark Arts are not about intent to do evil. You are not—"

"Don't," she whispered, her heart beating hard and fast. "Don't. I don't want to hear that argument—" She pressed her hands against her temples. "I _can't_ , Severus. You know how I feel about the— you know how I feel. About that. I would never use magic like that. Dumbledore would never . . . _no_."

_Dumbledore set up your son like a lamb for slaughtering . . ._

He did not answer right away. "Very well," he said, his voice grown cold. "Then we will accept St. Mungo's diagnosis and leave it at that."

He pushed himself up from his chair rather abruptly and crossed the room. She heard the sound of water pouring, and then he returned, holding a glass of water, which he pushed at her. "Here," he said curtly. Lines of annoyance were carven into his face. He was not Occluding the way she'd become accustomed to him doing.

She accepted the glass in silence and sipped from it. The water felt like blessed relief pouring down her throat.

Severus resumed his chair, still looking displeased. Lily knew he was angry about her refusal to listen to him, but she wasn't going to get into another of those debates with him. She'd always hated arguing about Dark magic; they'd never been able to reach any kind of agreement, only a mutual silence approaching resentment when it came to the Dark Arts. She didn't want to get back into that—to go backward, fighting her way through that snarl in her friendship, one of the massive ones that had led to their irrevocable breach, before dying and losing everything had made it seem small, in comparison . . .

There was so much she didn't want to go back to.

"Sev," she half-whispered. He cut his eyes at her, but his annoyed expression didn't change. "I don't . . . I don't want to fight about the Dark Arts. That's all I mean. And I know we'll fight about it, and I don't want to us fight, about anything—unless it's about something stupid, you know? That's . . . that's all. Okay?"

When had her indignation about this subject faded, her utter certainty that it was her job to try and shift Severus from believing the Dark Arts were anything but evil? Probably since she'd tried, he'd gone down that road anyway, and come out the other side a man whose guilt had nearly killed him yesterday.

Or perhaps since she'd forgiven him. Because she truly _had_ , or the counter-curse _wouldn't_ _have worked_.

Severus was regarding her narrowly. Then he said, "All I wish for you to consider is that I may have a better understanding of Dark magic after all this time than I did at sixteen. I was—an idiot at sixteen."

She thought there might be an unspoken _And I might have a better knowledge of it than you at twenty-one_ in there, too.

"I'm sure you have a lot better understanding than me," she said, trying to sound fair and reasonable. "But I just—I hate talking about them, Sev. I know you did them, and—and that's okay, all right? I—it's all in the past. Really, it is."

Severus stared at her. He brought his hands together and started rubbing the knuckles of his left hand with his right. _Please don't make us fight about this_ , she begged, wondering if his Leglimency would pick it up.

"It is not the Dark Arts that have changed me," he said at last, "if that is what you are wondering. And you could never channel the power for them to change you. If that is your worry."

Lily blinked. "I—what?"

"Dark magic, like any magic, operates on a scale." He kept watching her, as if waiting for the point when he'd push her too far on this. "Just like Light magic. Minerva teaches first-years to turn match-sticks into needles, and seventh-years how to turn furniture into animals. A first year could not replicate advanced magic. Neither could you perform an advanced Dark spell. And it is not until one advances in the Dark Arts that the backlash of which I spoke earlier begins to have an effect upon the caster's psyche."

"But Contrapasso—what it did to you—Sev, that was no matchstick-to-needle spell!"

"No, it is a powerful spell. But it is not a _powerful Dark_ spell."

That's when Lily knew she'd been hooked into talking about the Dark Arts with him _again_. The wily bastard. Lily set down her water glass so she wouldn't drop it, crush it, or hurl it across the room. "Fine." She glared at him. "But you'd better make this really, really good. Why do you think it's Dark?"

"I am only theorizing," Severus said, sounding, for him, almost placating. "Based on your description of your symptoms." Then, abruptly, he switched gears. "Do you know how Light magic works?"

"I . . . " She didn't. Was that stupid? "With a wand? But—no, you use a wand for Dark magic, too—so that's not it—"

"Light magic uses a wand to give you control over your own powers. Think of it as trying to get water from a spring: you use your wand like a ladle to draw the water, and the more powerful you are, the more you can fill your ladle. When you start out, you can necessarily only draw a very little water, or power—so, the match-sticks—but by the time you have been properly trained, you are able to transform inanimate objects into living matter."

"Okay," she said, understanding this.

"All you are using is your own power, with your wand as a kind of conduit. You make it work through willpower and focus; it is a control-piece for your abilities. But you have no more power after you have transfigured your desk into a pig than you had before you started; you've simply used what you have.

"The Dark Arts do not use your wand as an instrument of power; they use you."

Lily blinked.

"Think of the spring again," he said. His voice had taken on the quality and power it had held when he'd been talking to of Voldemort the politician; compelling, almost hypnotic. "When you use Light magic, you can only take as much water out as your ladle allows you. Your potential is finite. But when you use Dark magic, you open yourself up to the access of powers far beyond what you could otherwise summon. _You_ are the instrument, not your wand, even though you use it to direct the power that you call upon. The power you are receiving is coming from someplace else; it is not yours. It is in that way that Dark Arts give you more power for the level of spell you perform than Light magic. A low-level Light spell will have hardly any effect on your environment; a low-level Dark spell will have a far greater one."

"So . . . that's why you're saying Contrapasso can have such a strong effect on you even though it's low-level . . . " Did that mean a high-level Light spell was only as good as a low-level Dark spell? But then a powerful Dark Arts spell . . . she felt sick.

Severus tilted his head forward, as if in half a nod, his hair swinging across one cheek. "That is one reason that people become obsessed with the Dark Arts: they find it too plodding and tedious to return to Light spells, which give them so much less for such comparatively high effort. The Dark Arts increase the power you have access to each time you push yourself. But you can't get something for nothing; that is true three-fold of magic. What the Dark Arts give you, they take away in equal measure."

"The pain," she realized, remembering how her whole body pounded as the world spun. "The backlash."

"Yes." Did he looked pleased that she was following? "The pain you described—disorientation, sensitivity to light, unstable equilibrium, and aches—are common side-effects of a low-level Dark Arts spell."

"That's what you get from a _little_ one? I felt like I'd been knocked flying by a lorry!"

"And that is why most people do not proceed far in the Dark Arts, for all their blustering," Severus said, as if this were no big deal at all. "Crucio is like a slap on the wrist compared to the backlash of a middling Dark Arts spell. Much of the Dark magic used in the war was only low-level spells. There were very few wizards, even among the Death Eaters, where the practice was encouraged, even rampant, who could get above simple spells."

For a few moments she was silent, taking this in, wondering if she really wanted to ask what was next . . .

"Who could do the more powerful ones?" she asked, her voice falling hushed between them. "Malfoy?"

Severus snorted, looking honestly amused in a contemptuous way. "Lucius could never get above low-middling. I am not exaggerating about the pain, Lily. Do you remember how you were when you woke up here?"

 _Don't blush, don't blush—_ Was Sev blushing too? Well, it had probably been pretty embarrassing to be manhandled like that.

"I mean your emotions," he said, coughing once.

"I—I felt terrified," she recalled. "I—you were safe, I knew you were . . . safe, that you'd make me feel . . . better."

"That is also part of the backlash," he said quietly. "The exact emotion and the extent correspond to the purpose of the spell used, not to the intent. Contrapasso invoked feelings of anguish, intense fear . . . you became frightened. Again, this is not necessarily proof that the spell is Dark in nature—or that it operates on similar principles, at the least—but it makes it logical to suppose that it does."

Lily swallowed. She made herself focus on the conversation, not what it could mean.

"So," she said, her voice shaking a bit on the ends, "most people can't deal with the backlash, and that's why they don't progress?"

"Correct." He studied one fingernail—deliberately not looking at her? "More than occasionally, the backlash is not survived. If one reaches beyond one's potential to endure the pain." Now he was picking at the nail . . . definitely not looking at her.

Lily's stomach bottomed out. "People _kill_ themselves?"

"Not deliberately, but they overreach. Dark magic almost always changes those who practice it. If a witch or wizard can progress to the more powerful spells—if they can endure the pain—the extra power is . . . more than intoxicating."

The tone of Sev's voice—the soft look on his face—and Lily knew, absolutely, that Severus was one of the few Death Eaters who'd got past middling power.

"You would endure anything," he said, still in that soft voice, "just to keep getting that power."

Lily couldn't speak. But then his voice became stronger, as if he were rising out of that reminiscence, back to reality, to the present, which was good, before she decided how she should feel.

"But remember that you don't get anything for nothing. The Dark Arts work not only on your magic, but on your mind. Bellatrix is an excellent example. She could perform spells of extreme power, but she got . . . addicted to the pain. Most people do, on those levels; it is the only way to survive to progress that far. But the pain and the power become all one, and when that happens, the caster changes into a completely different person. Those like Bellatrix—and the Dark Lord; he is on a level above even hers—become unable to identify with anything but pain. To cause others pain, to endure it themselves, brings them joy. It has a mentally _beneficial_ effect."

Perhaps he could interpret the expression on her face, although she had no idea what it was telling him—but he said, in a hard voice, "That did not happen to me, and it will not."

"Why?" she whispered. Her voice was shaking as she thought of Sev liking to hurt people—her Sev— "What makes you so special?"

"Occlumency," he said simply.

"What?"

"Occlumency. It and Leglimency are not precisely spells; they are mind arts. They require the ability to manipulate your own mind and those of others. There is a way of . . . I can only think to describe it as 'boxing up' a part of your mind. You know that extended exposure to Cruciatus damages the mind?"

She nodded dumbly. Severus did that to himself for _fun_?

"As will any form of torture—prolonged exposure to physical and mental anguish warps a person's mind. It . . . breaks them. The Dark Arts will eventually do this to you, unless you know how to endure the pain without the breaking. I could—divide my mind, so that one part of me remained . . . inviolate, while the other endured the pain. Only Narcissa—Lucius' wife—was able to replicate my methods."

"What, did you teach her?" Lily asked, somehow revolted by this idea.

"Yes." He shrugged slightly. "Narcissa was very keen on the mind arts. So were the Dark Lord and Bellatrix—but they were uninterested in what they called 'tricks.' They thought Narcissa and I weak for . . . blocking out the pain. They wished to endure it with no barriers . . . saw it as a mark of strength. Well, they wound up mad, which anyone could have told them would be the case. Thought they were above it . . . "

He trailed off, staring perhaps into these recollections. Lily felt like laughing hysterically at the idea that Severus called terrifying Death Eaters by their sodding first names. She couldn't speak. She wasn't sure if this calm little lecture was better than their shouting at each other about how stupid the other was being, or far, far worse.

"The Dark Arts will never change me," he said, still looking off at nothing, "unless I wish them to, and I have seen enough of madness to know that it is not escape from reality, merely transference to a different one. Nor will you be changed into a sadist by one Dark Arts spell, certainly not by the one you cast. Contrapasso is a spell of remorse and forgiveness—if anything, you will feel slightly more guilty or forgiving for a time. Perhaps a little of both."

This sounded nastily like the truth. Dumbledore had even flat-out told her that learning forgiveness of one's own mistakes was the only assistance to forgiving others . . . he had used the spell to _teach_ her that. And she had felt so wretchedly guilty, so sick with remorse, watching Severus under her curse . . . she had forgiven _both_ of them to lift it, forgiven with all her heart . . .

"It can't have been," she said numbly, staring unseeing in Severus' direction, "it can't have been dark?" Because how, how could it have been Dark? How could Dumbledore have created—how could he have taught them a spell that . . .

_You used it on Avery. You **knew** it hurt. What's the difference between a Light spell that hurts and a Dark spell that hurts? Only the conduit, Severus says . . ._

"Lily." She felt Severus put his hand on her shoulder, lightly at first, and then gripping. His touch was very warm. "It is Dark because it gives you access to power outside yourself, not because it is evil, or wishes to cause pain. The backlash you felt was not punishment; it was the nature of balance. The intent and effect of the spell, even the nature, do not change because it is Dark."

"But then why do they call it Dark?" She didn't know whether she wanted to push his hand off or bury her face in his shoulder.

"Because the Dark Arts are extremely dangerous to practice and typically incanted to inflict pain. It is another ouroboros: they cause pain, which leads you to endure it, which leads you to prefer it. Only those who are unaffected by the pain will pursue spells that have a more positive effect." He paused. "Which leads me to believe that Dumbledore also knew the trick of dividing the mind. He was accomplished in the mind arts; I would bet on his knowing it. And he created this spell."

She nodded, her face in her hands. She understood . . . but she didn't. Because it didn't make _sense._ It didn't make sense that Dumbledore would have worked Dark magic, and taught them how . . . that was part of what they were _fighting._ The Order had been about _defending_ justice . . . but if they were using Dark magic, then . . .

Severus rubbed at her shoulder, but tentatively, as if he wasn't sure he should.

She parted her fingers but did not look up. "You think I'm overreacting."

He paused. "In my estimation," he said, "Yes. But I can appreciate that it is . . . an adjustment. I know how you . . . hated the Dark Arts." She feared and loathed them. "In many ways your—feelings are justified." She could hear the loathing in his voice; for what? "But in others— the Dark Arts themselves are not categorically evil. They merely lead in that direction, ninety-eight roads out of a hundred."

She felt there were ninety-eight roads she could go down at this moment, roads of things to say. She raked her hair back from her face, sitting up fully. He looked wary, as if prepared for her to find her wand and hex him. Would he have sat still for it?

She didn't want to hex him ever again in her life.

"Sev . . . do you know how I healed you?"

He didn't even blink. "I assumed you performed the counter-curse."

"I did, but it wasn't what I thought. It wasn't 'I forgive'—it was forgiveness."

A line appeared between his eyebrows. "I am afraid I do not—"

"I heard everything you said—everything you did—and I _forgave you_."

The room fell as silent as if it had been sucked free of sound. Then he said in a very small voice: "You couldn't have heard . . . "

"I heard about Dumbledore. About Hogwarts. About people who died." His breath hitched. "About Harry. And . . . and the prophecy." His whole body twitched. He had gone utterly, deathly white.

She wrapped her hand around his and drew their fists over her heart. "Severus, I forgave everything. I've forgiven you. For all of it." _Even the things that weren't mine to forgive._

"You . . . what?" he said, blinking as if thrown off-kilter. He was staring at their joined hands. Could he feel the beat of her heart?

"The whole time you were cursed, I felt so guilty, so horrible—and then I was listening to you tell me about Harry, and the second war, and I started thinking of everything that had happened, and—the penny dropped. Dumbledore had told me . . . he said it was strongest when cast by those who wished to forgive. And I just—I understood, and—forgave you, and . . . the spell lifted."

Severus looked almost incredulous. "That seems far too simplistic to be true."

"Remus once told me something." His lip curled at the sound of the name and his eyes looked scorn, but he said nothing. "He said you don't forgive someone because they deserve it. You forgive them because they need it. Or because you do."

Severus blinked. "Because they . . . need it. How are you supposed to do that?"

"I don't know. You just do." She smiled at the look of bone-deep skepticism on his face. "How about you don't try casting Contrapasso any time soon? I think you'd have trouble getting it off."

"I imagine so," he said. "Mercy and forgiveness are not high on my list of virtues. Of course, it is a very short list."

Lily laughed. "There are only seven, aren't there? Not a very long list in any case."

"Well, all I have is patience." For a split second, he looked embarrassed, but then he smothered it. "So we're starting the New Year with forgiveness, are we? Ah, but that is of past sins. I am sure I will indulge in a vast deal more before the year is out. Perhaps even the week."

Lily snorted. "Got some left to try, have you?" Then she remembered—she looked around the room, but no; his mother wasn't there. "Severus, did your mum tell you about—"

"Lucius? Yes." Deftly, with the lightest of touches to her hand, he withdrew from her grip. Why?

She searched his face for clues, but he looked calm, unperturbed . . . Occluded? No, there was something around his eyes—

"I can't tell entirely from a second-hand report," he said in a voice to match his smooth, calm face, but she wasn't imagining it; his eyes were hard. "But it sounds promising so far. I am guessing he is quite enraged."

"Sev, please don't be flippant about this," she begged. _Please don't shut me out, don't take us back to . . . before_.

"Lily, there is no pain that Lucius can replicate which will come close in comparing to the backlash from the sort of Dark spell I am capable of casting. And I may remind you," he added, when she made a convulsive movement, "that I was a spy for several years. Lucius at this age does not have nearly the inventiveness of his older self, and nothing on the Dark Lord. It will be unpleasant, but I will be . . . all right."

"I hate the idea of you being hurt," she said, wanting to cry, thinking of Severus deliberately learning spells that put him in agony . . . she wasn't sure she would ever understand that. She wasn't sure she wanted to. _Crucio is a slap on the wrist in comparison . . ._

What if Dark Arts backlash was nothing compared to . . . other things?

She made herself stop thinking about it. Brushing off the few tears that had swelled onto her eyelashes, she looked up at him. She couldn't tell what he was thinking as he looked at her—or as he said: "Everyone gets hurt."

That was the truth. "I can still hate it."

Something like a smile touched one corner of his mouth. "If you prefer."

The smile was almost invisible, but it riveted some part of her. She had the urge to tug him back up onto the bed beside her, to recapture that moment of listening to his heartbeat and feeling safe, so safe . . . Whatever Severus said, the idea of Lucius hurting him made her sick and afraid. Unpleasant things really didn't stop being unpleasant, just because you'd lived through worse.

"Well," Severus said, calm now, "I thought I would reward your perseverance by telling you that you were right and the plan was utterly daft."

Lily felt her mouth fell open. Then she laughed; she couldn't help it. She shoved at his shoulder. "What! You berk! Why do you say that _now_?"

"Apparently I had forgotten how utterly incapable you are of pulling off a simple deception. Mother told me the Healers were ready to throw you on the mercy of the MLE." His tone was almost light, but that looked like worry in his face. Maybe she was just hoping.

"Oh, who cares about them," Lily said. "They're duffers." Severus snorted; she thought that might be the way he laughed now. "The plan got what you wanted it to, which was Lucius Malfoy in a lather, and I'm _not_ in the hands of the MLE _or_ on the business end of a Probity Probe, so I'd say, however _bloody_ daft it was, it was also a bit of a success."

There it was again, that invisible smile. Then it faded. "If I had known the spell would hurt you," he said, his eyes, his face and voice reminding her of mountain pools, "I would never have entertained the thought of using it."

She felt warm, especially her face, but it was the kind of warmth that made you smile. "Well, news flash for you: if you have to go out and get hurt, I'm gonna get some too. Don't be sexist—equality for all."

"Trust you to turn my lack of sadism into an anti-feminist statement."

"I am just trying to preserve social equilibrium," she said primly. "Ooh, let me tell you how the decoys worked—"

Four years spent thick as thieves with the Marauders had given Lily a flair for telling a stupid story, if she did say so herself. She foisted his mother's role of dead-creepy staring onto the absent guard, leaving Mrs. Snape out of the thing entirely, and described how she'd waited for the opportune moment to detonate the decoy; how she'd lobbed one across the room into the sick bucket when the first one went off and everyone scrambled shrieking away from the sparkle rockets. She was in the middle of describing the rainbow vomit exploding through the air—Severus had a hand over his face, making that funny snorting noise she suspected was his way of laughing now—when the door to the room swung open and his mother walked in.

Lily stopped dead. Severus looked up, and his expression changed to one of pure surprise.

Behind Mrs. Snape was Lily's mum.

" _Mum_?" she said, flabbergasted. If she'd been standing, she'd have staggered.

"Lily." Mum was pale. She put both her hands on Lily's face, as if to reassure herself Lily was really there, and then hugged her tight, her arms wrapping around her shoulders.

"You are in so much trouble," she said as she pulled back to smooth Lily's hair away from her face. There was a slight smile around her eyes, but Lily knew she _was_ in trouble.

Her mother looked over Lily's shoulder; Severus must have moved to stand and caught her attention. "Mrs. Evans," he said, no longer acting thirty-eight and self-possessed, but instead rather embarrassed to be caught in hospital pajamas, if the way he'd tightly folded his dressing-gown around himself was any indication.

"Severus," Mum said, in a calm voice that gave nothing away. "Your mother tells me you two were _experimenting_ with _spells_?"

She gave them both a look to suggest she suspected this was the magical version of driving a car while high.

"It is an ill-advised activity that our children frequently indulge in," Mrs. Snape said from her corner, where from her chair she watched them all as if they were a mildly interesting television program.

"And it _hospitalized_ the pair of you?"

Mum's tone was now more readable, but not in a good way. Lily had the nasty suspicion that her mother _would_ ban her from seeing Severus during hols if she thought he was endangering her safety.

She blurted, "It was my idea," at the exact moment Sev did. Lily turned to give him a stern look and found him doing the same, only his was much better.

"It was my idea," he said sharply. "Don't even bother to lie about it, you're wretched at it."

Lily growled at him. It still had no effect on him, the stupid git. Then she had a flash of inspiration. "Fine, I won't," she said, clearly surprising him, "if _you_ don't deny it was to help us avoid the Death Eaters."

Severus blinked.

"The who?" Mum said, sounding bewildered. Mrs. Snape in her corner had given no noticeable reaction.

"They're a gang," Lily said, watching Sev, "at school." She lifted her chin and looked at all three of them, even his dreadful mother. "They hate Muggle-borns. They like to hex them with nasty spells for fun."

In the corner, Mrs. Snape began to run one finger around the tip of her wand, but otherwise did not move. Her eyes were not on Lily but on her son. But Severus only blinked.

Mum's hand had crept up to her chest, where it lay over her heart. She had gone white. "This is _allowed_?"

"No," Severus said, "but neither is it allowed for Muggle children to attack their fellow students for being homosexual. It is not directly correlative," he added, "but hate crimes flourish everywhere."

Mum's shock wavered into confusion. "'Hate crimes'?"

"They're not a large gang," Lily assured her. It was true in the present, at least. "And they're careful not to do anything too bad—everyone at school hexes everyone else—it's like pranking, only with magic," she explained, trying to let no hint of her own horror at magical brutality peep through. "Sev and I were only practicing to defend ourselves, that's all."

Mum only kept staring at her. Lily hadn't expected this reaction, this—haunted confusion. She looked at Severus in mute appeal, but to her shock it was his mother who spoke.

"Severus," she said, "is this . . . _gang_ associated with the Traditionalist Movement?"

He blinked again. "Yes," he said, sounding surprised.

"Well, that began decades before you were born. They are a conservative political group," Mrs. Snape said to Lily's mum, drawing her stunned attention away from her daughter. "They believe that certain ideas and . . . individuals from, shall we say, separate cultures . . . have invaded and will eventually erode their way of life. I imagine these . . . Death Eaters . . . " A faint sneer marked her face. " . . . are the children of parents within that movement. School-children do not have any real opinion of tradition, nor any concept of cultural threat. This sounds like a cluster of bullies who regurgitate their parents' dogma for convenience's sake. Are many of them in Slytherin?" she asked Severus. He only nodded, a tiny movement. "Then their families will be deeply traditional. The children who bully Muggle-borns—mostly young men, I imagine; that is the sort of behavior pure-blood sons are encouraged to—I imagine they would bully their peers anyway, only now they will receive praise at home instead of punishment, their actions regarded as support of family values. It is of more benefit to them to be in this gang of . . . Death Eaters than out of it."

Lily blinked several times, feeling it was her turn to be stunned. She looked from her own mum's face, which was slack with either disbelief or confusion, to Severus'. He was not looking at anyone, and he was intensely unreadable. What was he thinking? Sometimes she wished she was a Leglimens so she could _know_.

"And I imagine," Mrs. Snape went on in a sinking voice, now watching her son, "that children who were brought up to court the favor of such families would also think it of . . . benefit, to associate with this gang."

Severus was not breathing. Lily wanted to cry.

"Well," said Mum, her voice shaking a little as she inhaled, "I don't think my school was ever so complicated."

It broke the tension a little. Severus sat down in his chair, but he still did not look at anyone. Lily leaned over and took his hand. His whole body twitched. He looked first at their joined hands, then her face, his eyes almost vibrating they were moving so fast. She smiled at him, a small one, but she meant every centimeter of it.

"Lily, do they pick on you?" her mother asked, her forehead creased with worry.

"Not very much, no," she said. "There are lots of Muggle-borns, and plenty of other pure-bloods and half-bloods like Sev who don't care." Severus' hand convulsed in hers, but he didn't withdraw; on the contrary, he was now gripping her so tightly, he made his mother's bruising touch seem light as air. "Some people," she went on, wondering if she should say this, if she should go this far . . . "get picked on for reasons nowhere near as semi-valid as impressing their parents."

Severus closed his eyes for a second longer than a blink. His almost cruel grip had still not softened. With her thumb, Lily rubbed a small circle on the back of his hand.

Mum's measuring gaze moved from Severus' down-turned face to his and Lily's joined hands, to Lily's eyes, and then briefly to Mrs. Snape. Perhaps Mum was thinking that it had to all be true, because Mrs. Snape, who'd apparently tattled on Lily and Sev and _brought Lily's mum to the bloody hospital_ , knew all about these magical boarding-school politics, and was agreeing with the children she'd set up for punishment.

"I had no idea any of this went on," Mum said finally. She didn't seem to like that idea.

"Did _you_ tell your mum everything that went on at school?" Lily said, smiling at her.

"No," Mum said wryly. "That's what worries me." She sighed, passing her hand over her face. "Lily, if you were having trouble, I wish you'd have _told_ me. Not run off to London and put yourself in the hospital trying to protect yourself."

Lily bit her lip. The expression on Mrs. Snape's face made her want to snarl, even if she understood it: highly skeptical, as if she knew, unlike Lily's mum, that there was nothing for a Muggle parent to do. It was _true_ , and perhaps that's what Lily hated most of all: a witch mother's gentle scorn for a Muggle mother who couldn't help her daughter in this.

"I repeat," Lily said to her mum, summoning her smile again, pretending Mrs. Snape and her pure-blood condescension didn't exist, "is that what you'd have done when you were sixteen?"

"That is neither here nor there," Mum said sternly. "I can tell you my mother wouldn't have let you off the hook any more than I am going to."

"As a matter of fact, I believe the circumstances may be different," Mrs. Snape said. Mum and Lily looked round at her, but Sev did not. He was staring out the window. "From my understanding of the current Headmaster, he encourages his students to search for their own solutions, rather than consult authority figures. Of course, in part this is pure-blood practice, for children to . . . look out for themselves. We call it 'self-reliance' and believe it . . . builds character." The faint sneer was tinting her face again. She had started rotating her wand between the fingers of both hands.

"I beg your pardon, but I do not agree with that outlook," Mum said, her mouth a firm, thin line.

"My point being, Mrs. Evans, that your daughter—and my son, and all the children at Hogwarts—spend ten months of every year learning that their problems are best and most easily solved by themselves, or at most among their peers. In some families, the lesson is reinforced continuously at home. And seventeen is our age of majority. Severus will be a legal adult in less than nine days. While it is still my responsibility until that time to punish him for any transgressions I deem worthy of such action, he is already well-versed in the practice of seeking to right his difficulties on his own."

Mum blinked, but her voice when she spoke was perfectly self-possessed. "In the Muggle world, children don't come of age until they are eighteen. In my eyes, Mrs. Snape, Lily is still a child."

"When two separate cultures merge, friction frequently occurs. Forgive me, Mrs. Evans; it is not my desire to criticize your methods of raising your daughter. I am merely seeking to offer an . . . alternative viewpoint." Then she looked at Severus. "If you are well enough to travel, I believe we should return home."

"I feel fine," Severus said, very quiet. But he retrieved the pile of neatly folded clothes she had brought with her, and retreated into the adjacent washroom to change.

Lily watched him go, feeling an odd empty space in her chest, on the other side of her heart.

* * *

 

"What have you done to anger Lucius Malfoy?"

Severus had been expecting this. She'd been too distant at the hospital, far too distant for the woman he knew his mother was. _Lucius Malfoy sends his regards. He wants you to let him know when you've recovered_ —and a look that connected with Severus' mind so deftly, it was only years of training that called up the proper response, when his body and magic and psyche were so battered. But it had been difficult; the Occlumency he should be able to weave across his mind with only the ghost of effort had nearly buckled, leaving him feeling as if he'd only just managed to deflect his mother's probing, the way a stone thrown just right across the water will skate across the surface.

"You will answer me, Severus," his mother said, her voice as hard and cold as the black ice on the winter streets.

"I was supposed to meet him yesterday," Severus said, careful not to look at her. "I didn't."

His mother said the rest for him, still in that hard, cold, biting voice. "You wound up in the hospital instead."

"Yes."

The pauses were as cold as her voice. "The Muggle-born girl said she put you there. That you asked her to."

"Lily is a poor liar, Mother."

"She seemed to be telling the truth."

"That is what I mean."

He could feel his mother watching him, as if the combination of her gaze, her frustration and anger, pushed out from her like the weight of a spell. "She said she was trying to save your life."

Yes, Lily was melodramatic like that. Most Gryffindors were. "That is how Gryffindors see the world."

He realized, then, that Lily's belief in that regard was the way she had brought herself to hex him: the belief that what she was doing would save him from worse.

Lily didn't understand—this wasn't about saving him. The man he was could not be _saved_ or rescued. He could only try to prevent the worst, at this point. Because if his previous years had not been the worst, he didn't want to know what could be.

Severus did not believe there would be any point past which things could not go. Not if left up to chance. The only hope he had was of taking a small measure of control, just enough to tweak circumstances to give him room to escape when he needed. And he always would.

He watched his mother's face harden even more, as if it were turning from ice to stone. "Is this about that schoolyard gang?"

 _They will be considerably more than that._ Right now they weren't. At the moment they were little more than bullies in the grand scheme of life, borderline psychopathic boys raised on an alternating diet of injudicious praise and brutal discipline. They liked to torment small animals and scare the girls. But the present was never static. Those boys had been fed a spark of nastiness in childhood; like Contrapasso with remorse, their adolescent sadism would blow into a flame, urged to a roar by their parents' dogmatic principles of tradition and honor, until it found a home in the Dark Lord's camp and surged like a brush fire into a dead, dry open field.

"The Death Eaters?" he said to his mother. "Yes."

"Have you joined?"

He only shook his head.

"But they thought you wanted to. _Lucius Malfoy_ thought you wanted to."

Severus only nodded, not bothering to speak.

His mother pressed her wand against the table, point down. Rigid. "How many of your fellow students were aware of this ambition?"

"All of my friends in Slytherin."

Severus forced himself to breathe evenly. He didn't look at her. With the memory of his pain at the hospital, he did not wish to Occlude, especially if it wouldn't keep her out.

"Mother of Christ, Severus," his mother said, surprising him. "Did you even stop to think how this— _transgression_ will be treated by your peers? You cannot have failed to notice how Slytherin _works_!"

"I have reneged on an ambition," Severus said, struggling for distance, but without Occlumency he wasn't sure how to get to it. "That is a necessary ambition to covet in the present climate of the House. I have discommoded Lucius Malfoy, even humiliated him, it might not be too far to say. The Malfoys are a powerful family . . . Lucius was a powerful student. Perhaps the most powerful in the school. His power lingers."

His mother's expression . . . it looked like—anguish.

"Severus. If you've done this to yourself for that girl—"

"I have done it for myself."

She did not speak at first. Severus breathed, trying to find a way to moderate his tone. Anguish . . . he knew anguish; knew it of old, and knew it again—over and over again.

"When a Slytherin realizes his ambitions have turned to dust," he said, "he brushes them off and starts anew."

"Not at the cost of his own life, Severus."

Oh, she had no idea.

"They won't kill me," he said. "If that's what you're worried about. They will merely make life . . . unpleasant."

The trick wouldn't be bearing out the storm. Severus could survive them; he knew he could. He had survived far worse than adolescent malice. And he'd probably, in this regard, get lucky and they would all be so desperate to get Lucius' approval that they would trip over each other trying to land their own blows of revenge. Each would want to be the one to show Lucius what excellent Death Eater material he would make, and Slytherins were not loyal among themselves when the price was the cost of their ambition. The full force of Slytherin brought to bear against him—his mother and Lily (and he, himself) might have cause for anxiety then. But Severus could endure the divided malice of squabbling teenagers. He'd done it for twenty-seven years.

No, what Severus didn't want was to draw attention to himself by alerting the Dark Lord or Albus Dumbledore to the extent of his abilities, particularly in Dark magic. If he were no longer to be the Dark Lord's ally, Severus' proficiency would be seen as a threat. And the threat he'd appear to Dumbledore . . .

His mother was watching him with narrowed eyes. Then she said abruptly: "You have the option to remove yourself from school, you realize. All students may pursue a private course of study, if at any time they find Hogwarts does not meet their . . . needs."

Such as the desire to keep breathing. "Yes," he said. He didn't have trouble summoning vagueness that time; here was the question he'd been needling for some time: that of going back to school. Back to Hogwarts, the old Hogwarts, before so many things had gone wrong . . . but when, honestly, not much was going right, not for him, at any rate: pursued by the Marauders for his own pursuits; disliked by his professors and his peers outside of Slytherin; tolerated within for his attentions to the right people, partially respected for the sheer nastiness of hexes at his command . . .

Watching Lily stand within arm's reach of that utter shit, James Potter . . .

Watching for a second time as she fell in love with and married the man who had once told her he hurt Severus _because he existed._

Severus would never cast Contrapasso on Lily, no matter what it meant for his survival. He loved her unto misery and into despair, loved her past life and death; but he wasn't sure he could ever forgive her for loving that man. For loving those _men_ whom he hated so much that he sometimes thoughts hearts could break as much from hatred as from love.

And if he didn't go back to school, what then? He had said good-bye to Hogwarts on the night Albus died. From the moment Death Eaters set foot in the school—real Death Eaters, not their nascent, adolescent ghosts—he had known he would have to say good-bye. There would never be another night when it would belong to him.

Hogwarts was a part of his heart, the way Lily was, even Dumbledore. When a thing became a part of your heart, a part of it always remained, but nothing stayed in its entirety . . . and the night he had killed Albus, Severus had felt Hogwarts leaving him, just as Lily had left when he shouted _Mudblood_ , as Dumbledore left with the words _Avada Kedavra_. Hogwarts had left him because he'd done everything he promised.

Could he even go back there? Did he want to? If there were no fledgling Death Eaters, no malice, no Marauders—if he could walk in through the front doors and find Dumbledore waiting for him, Minerva and Filius and Pomona, the halls shining gold with sunlight, would he return?

He would walk through death to stand in that Hogwarts once again.

Severus closed his eyes.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Several of the OC's surnames were lifted from P.G. Wodehouse novels.
> 
> Oh, the _profanity_ in this chapter - rampant abuse of the word "fuck," sexual references, incl. those of a homophobic nature (yes, the character is being an asshole). I cut it down a bit from the original version, too.

_January 8, 1977_

"Bye, Mum," Lily said, leaning into her mother's hug. Her mum's scent was almost overpowered by the smell of wet cement, damp cat fur and owl droppings.

Mum hugged her back almost fiercely. "Are you sure you're well enough to travel?" She nudged Lily upright to could frame her face with her gloved hands. "I don't like the way you look. Maybe we should write to the school and I should drive you up there in a few days . . . "

Lily smiled, feeling her face muscles ache. "I'm just tired. After the prefect meeting I'll find someplace quiet to take a nap. And if that doesn't do it," she squeezed her mum's hand, "Madam Pomfrey can fix me up. She knows loads more than those duffers at St. Mungo's."

Mum's gaze searched her face with skeptical anxiety, but in the end she smiled and kissed Lily's forehead. Lily tried to pretend her mum's smile didn't look pained.

"Good-bye, sweetheart," Mum said, brushing Lily's hair with her fingers. "Have a good term and write me tomorrow, all right? Owls and all."

Lily kissed her mum's cheek as the train's whistle rent the air and clouds of steam billowed up from the tracks across the crowded platform. "I love you," she said, giving her mum one last squeezing hug as the parents and children around them began a final surge toward the train.

Lily stepped up into the car, hauling her trunk up with her, trying not to trip over a first-year who'd toppled over his own trunk, or get trampled by a pair of fifth-years scrambling onto the train right behind her. She flattened herself to one side as they barreled past, and leaned out the door one last time to wave to her mum as the train pulled the platform away. She saw her mum press her hand to her mouth and mime blowing a kiss, and then the train looped around a corner in the tracks and pushed King's Cross out of sight.

For a moment Lily stood in the now-vacant vestibule, her back resting against the rattling wall of the train, and closed her eyes. The exhaustion that had plagued her since New Years had never let up. Sev's theory was that her cold over Christmas was combining with the effect of Dark magic, but he hadn't been Occluding and she could tell he was worried. She hoped Madam Pomfrey would be able to tell her what was wrong . . .

Someone was trying to take her trunk from her hand. She gripped its handle more tightly and opened her eyes—

"Hi, Sev," she said, barely resisting the suddenly overpowering urge to tilt forward and bury her face in his shoulder. He might be far too skinny, even bony, but something about his shoulder—already wrapped in his scratchy school robes—was calling to her like a warm feather bed.

His eyes narrowed as he looked her over. "You look like you haven't been sleeping at all."

"I have been," she said, hearing the grainy weariness in her voice. "It just doesn't seem to do any good." But already she felt . . . warmer than when she'd first climbed on the train. She pushed herself upright from the wall, blinking to get her eyes to agree to stay open. "Can you take that with you, if it's not too much trouble? I don't feel like lugging it to the Prefects' cabin and back—"

"I don't think you should go to the bloody Prefects cabin," Severus said, as though she were really talking about going dragon-riding. "I think you should be resting."

"I can't not turn up to a Prefects meeting, Sev. I'm not ill, just tired."

"You _look_ ill," he said, his eyes narrowing even further. "I want you to describe your symptoms to me."

"After the Prefects meeting," she said, smiling at him. "All right?" Because his eyes had narrowed practically to slits, she wrapped both hands around his arm and squeezed. For a moment she felt a rush of warmth, as if she'd received a transfusion of wellness. "Find a compartment and wait for me?"

"All right," he said, looking at her hand as if it were a foreign object. "But I'm seeing you to the damn Prefects car."

Lily was too tired to argue—but as it turned out, arguing would have been a prat's move: the train was a madhouse. Kids were shrieking, chasing each other, snogging out in the corridor; Zonko's products rattled the chaos, and someone in one of the compartments had let off violently purple fireworks to delighted screams and bangs. Sev went in front of her, displaying an almost miraculous ability to get crowds to knife apart after one look at him, but Lily still had to seize the back of his robes to avoid tripping.

At one point Sev barked at a group of giggling first years to "Sit down and shut up!" and they popped into their compartment and into their seats before they even seemed to realize what was happening. Lily couldn't help grinning at them as she went past; their eyes were round as jawbreakers.

"Now I know what kind of teacher you were," she whispered as they pushed through the space between the cars. Severus glanced curiously over his shoulder at her. "You were the kind that terrified your students into submission."

"I didn't know there was another type I could be," he said, but she saw a smirk sketched over his reflection on the glass.

He pulled open the door into the Prefects' car and nudged her through it. It was a lot quieter in there, since it was only for upper-classmen and James and Sirius weren't prefects. There was a lot more snogging going on up against the windows and in the booths, and a blessed absence of fireworks.

"When you are done," Severus told her sternly, "come straight and find me. No assisting the fatheaded students. Hex them if you have to, or lock them in the loo. If you won't, I _will_ when I have to come and pry them off you."

"Fine," she said, her voice shaking from the effort of not laughing. It shouldn't be funny, the idea of Severus blasting some poor homesick first year through the door of the washroom, but it was anyway. Just a bit. "I'll shirk my duties if _you_ get to a compartment without hexing _anyone_."

"Unfortunately for everyone," he said, "there isn't any car close enough."

Lily smiled at him, squeezed his shoulder one last time, and let the car door slide shut behind her. She shivered, pulling her coat around her; it was colder in this train car, even though Felicity Meadowes and Martin Peakes were steaming up the windows.

Lily dropped behind the first empty table she came to, folded her arms on it, and laid her head down. She just wanted to sleep until she got to Scotland . . . Sev was probably right and she should have just gone with him, sent a note to the Head Boy and Girl that she was still suffering from a holiday malady . . . or had Sev go and boss them; they wouldn't have dared argue . . .

"Is everyone here?" a girl's voice called authoritatively across the open car. "All the Prefects? If so, we'll call this meeting to order."

Lily managed to sit up and lean her head against the back of her booth, but it was too hard to keep her eyes open. She listened to the sound of teenagers giggling and muttering and sifting to their seats, thinking she was a teenager too, now . . . and Sev looked like one, but it seemed like it might be a while before he quit thinking of himself as a teacher . . . if ever . . .

"All right," said the Head Boy, whose name Lily was too tired to remember at the moment, "since this is just a post-holiday meeting, we'll keep it short—"

He was interrupted by the car door's hissing open. A very familiar voice brought Lily wide awake:

"Sorry, everyone!" Sirius called. "Sorry to keep you all waiting, but here he is, the man of the hour, our very own Loopy—"

"Oh, shut up, Padfoot," came Remus' muffled groan.

"Seriously, Pads, you're going to make Moony's brain bleed out his ears, shouting like that—"

It seemed James had got his head untransfigured. Lily sat very still, not daring to look around, wishing she'd staggered to a table further up the car, but no, like a moron she had chosen the one right by the door—and Felicity Meadowes and Martin Peakes had sat down across from her and were nibbling each other's ears; that was just what she needed—

"Here you are, Moony," said James brightly. "Here's a seat all reserved for you by an admiring—Evans?"

Feeling as if she had come over ice, every part of her frozen except for her heart, which fluttered like a mad thing in her chest, Lily turned her head slowly toward the aisle.

James and Sirius were now supporting Remus, who looked as exhausted and ill as Lily felt. Had full moon been last night? As soon as her eyes landed on him, James snatched his Remus-free hand away from his hair—he must have been trying to mess it up. She almost burst into tears.

The roguish little smile he'd liked to pull out for her wavered, then. "Evans, what happened to you?" he said, looking her over in surprise, like a more wide-eyed version of Severus. "You look as bad as Moony."

"James," Remus said in a voice of strained patience. Sev may have joked that patience was his only virtue, but Remus could have shown St. Paul how it was done. "The entire car is listening and waiting for you, friends for life of mine, to bugger off out the car. So if you could just drop me and very kindly sod off—"

Sirius snorted. "Yeah, we'll drop you, all right, 'cause wet rags stand on their own better than you can right now." But he and James lowered Remus into the vacant seat next to Lily with surprising care, even propping Remus up, although his face had even more strained patience than his voice.

"Go away," he said through grit teeth and a mild smile, "before I send you off with a bang."

"Don't pine too hard for us being gone," Sirius said, messing his hair horribly so that it stuck up like a haystack. "You'd waste right away in this condition."

"Somehow I will manage," Remus said. "The way I am managing to not kill you horribly."

Sirius grinned and turned to go, with a halfway absent toss of his head that flipped his dark hair out of his eyes. James said, "Bye, Evans," and lingered, but Sirius was leaning against the door, pushing it open; James started to drift away.

"Bye, James," said Felicity Meadowes, fingering one of her dangly peacock feather earrings.

James turned swiftly, his face lighting up—but then he realized Lily was still sitting as a block of ice, and it was Felicity who was smiling at him while Martin Peakes stared sullen murder. James gave Felicity an awkward half smile and then nipped out after Sirius. The door banged shut behind them.

"Well, Lupin," said the Head Girl, "thanks for bringing the circus directly to the Prefects car. If you _don't_ mind, we'll be going on?"

"No, Rosemary," Remus said, with more of his strained patience. Rosemary Whatsherface sniffed, looking for a moment remarkably like Petunia, and then called the meeting to order. Felicity Meadowes and Martin Peakes started arguing in hushed tones, and Lily caught the name 'James Potter' and 'fancy that stupid git' and 'you didn't used to think he was a stupid git when you were practicing his Quidditch moves to show off for that tramp Amelia Cartwright.'

"Are you all right?" Lily asked Remus, muttering out of the corner of her mouth.

"Same old," he said, giving her a weak smile. His skin was an unhealthy shade of pale; and she had Severus to compare him to, whose skin on a good day was the color of parchment. Remus looked like a block of marble. The hair along his scalp was damp; there were red marks on the back of his hands, more peeking above his collared shirt, which was buttoned tight to his throat; and his bottom lip was cracked in a thin, bloody line. The shadows under his eyes resembled two black eyes. If someone hadn't seen James and Sirius tenderly hauling him around, they'd have thought he scuffled with the pair of them and lost.

"I can't possibly look as bad as you," Lily whispered. " _I_ didn't get trampled by a manticore."

He started to laugh, and then coughed, holding onto his ribs. She put out a hand toward him, but as soon as her fingers brushed his side, she felt a pulse of nausea. Pressing a hand to her mouth, she shut her eyes and leaned back.

"So what _did_ trample you?" Remus asked, sounding as tired as she felt.

"It got me in the dead of night and left me flat in the street," she said weakly as the wave of nausea ebbed away. "Hit and run."

Remus huffed. "Mine, too."

They were silent after that, listening to the Prefects and the Heads wind out a meeting that definitely did not feel short, although perhaps that was because Lily wanted it to be over so she could go hide in Severus' compartment. All she could think the whole meeting, with Remus sitting silent and exhausted next to her, was that if she turned into a block of ice whenever she saw James, she would be cold for the rest of the term.

* * *

 

Severus did not find an empty compartment, but he found one just as serviceable: it had a clump of very nervous-looking first years in it, and all he needed to do was open the door, look down his nose at them the way Professor Snape would have done, and say, "I believe this is my compartment."

They were gone so fast they left only little outlines of dust.

He must have been missing the contented feeling that came from bullying school-children, he thought as he stowed his trunk and Lily's on the luggage rack, because he felt an ounce more cheerful now. Or perhaps it was the solitude—it had been only by the grace of God that he hadn't hexed half the students on the train into meerkats.

He pulled out one of his notebooks and a Muggle biro, since it was impossible to write with quill and ink on a train, and flipped to the page where he had begun to make notes on Lily's illness. Madam Pomfrey would think he was some sort of stalker, but she needed a complete record if she were to diagnose Lily properly.

Severus had been exposed to a great many half-wits in the throes of Dark spell backlash, and he was as certain as could be that Lily was not suffering from the lingering effects of Contrapasso. Even if the caster had been weakened by mild illness in the days before casting a Dark spell, the illness and mania of backlash would not have got better before worsening again, and Lily had definitely been on the mend in the hospital. She did not even seem to be exhibiting the same symptoms as she had described from her first morning of backlash: no disorientation, dizziness, or pain, just fatigue and a heightened sensitivity to temperature. She complained of being cold, but whenever her hands touched him, they were warm. Not feverish, but if her hands were that warm in the first place, she shouldn't have been feeling an uncomfortable chill.

If it wasn't backlash, then Lily was either sick with something that had manifested after the backlash wore off—or she had been cursed. And in the life Severus had lived for so long, a minor worry was never revealed to be an overreaction in time. It always wound up being so much worse than you'd thought . . .

Lucius had met her on New Years morning. Severus' own mother had told Lucius that Lily had put Severus in the hospital. From what Lily and his mother had told him separately, Lucius had had very little time to fire off a spell—he probably hadn't been thinking clearly enough to summon the necessary subtlety to pull off a cursing without suspicion—but Severus was certain Lily had been cursed; and if not by Lucius, then by whom?

He and Lucius had always gotten along, once you factored out the petty degradation natural to a pure-blood snob dealing with a half-blood of poor family. (Well, poor _Muggle_ family, but he and his mother had certainly never been welcomed as Princes.) But if Lucius had done this to Lily, he would find himself gazing on the color of his own entrails . . . oh yes, he would.

If Severus had seriously thought there would be a great danger of the future Death Eaters finding out _Lily_ had prevented his meeting with the Dark Lord, he'd have never, ever included her; he would murdered, without a second thought, the one who told. But here was life testing his limits of homicidal mania, because the source of Lily's danger was firstly himself and then his own damned mother. He could loathe himself, but his mother's first loyalty was to her son, not his friends, and Slytherins understood that everyone had their priorities.

Severus would merely have to adjust his, as he figured out how to keep afloat at Hogwarts and eviscerate any miserable bastard that tried to hurt Lily.

A movement at the door made him look up. His wand was in his sleeve, in case it was any of the fledgling Death Eaters or their equally vicious counterparts, those fucking Marauders, but it was only Lily—

"There you are, Sev, at long, long, long last—you call this right outside? We've been looking all over the train!"

—except it wasn't only Lily, it was Lupin, too. He looked as if the full moon had dropped out of the sky and landed on him last night. His expression as he saw that Lily had, for some reason known only to her, dragged him to a compartment with horrible old Snivellus in it, was mostly confused and a little embarrassed.

Or maybe he was embarrassed by the fact that Lily was _crawling_ —there was no other word for it—onto Severus' seat.

"You don't mind I brought Remus, do you, Sev? Black and—Potter—" She stumbled a little, calling them that; Severus felt his fingers clench, on his wand, on his book. "—are in the middle of a fireworks display, it sounded like when we went by their compartment, and Remus is about to pass out. Like me."

Then she _laid her head in his lap_. Severus just barely stopped himself from convulsing in shock and knocking her to the floor.

To distract himself, he stared at Lupin, who seemed equally flabbergasted by this resoundingly mad behavior. Severus barked, "Get inside the door, Lupin, and stop letting in the bloody draft."

Lupin displayed the same alacrity as all the other students: he vaulted in through the door and onto the empty row of seats across from Severus. Then he blinked, as if, like the others, he couldn't think how he'd got there. Severus would have smirked if he'd been able to gather his wits, but they'd all gone on holiday at the sight of Lily's dark red hair flowing over his knees.

"Sev," she murmured, sounding half asleep, "you need to eat more . . . you're all bony . . . "

"Then find a better pillow," he said. But he pointed his wand at his trunk overhead. It clicked open and another of his robes slithered out, dropping into his hands. He folded it into a sloppy square and nudged her up so he could put it on his lap. It would have the added, or even main bonus of hiding anything . . . shameful. He would have said _It's hell being seventeen_ , but he had a nasty suspicion he was thinking too well of his self-control to imagine it was shredded only by youth.

With that taken care of, he was in a better frame of mind to terrorize Lupin, who looked weak, sweaty, and as confounded as it was possible for such a sickly little werewolf to be.

"What's the matter, Lupin?" Severus asked, narrowing his eyes for effect. "Do you need a pillow, too?"

He enjoyed the way a few more beads of sweat seemed to gather at Lupin's hairline. As a grown man, his unflappability had been surpassed by only Albus', the infuriating bastard. Bastard _s_.

"I'm fine pillow-less," Lupin said, with a tolerable imitation of normalcy.

Severus had thought Lily had fallen asleep, so it was only spy training that kept him from removing himself from his skin when she took his hand and _placed it_ _in her hair._ He stared. His palm was now resting against the soft, smooth strands of her hair, his fingers curved across her forehead, which was warm but not feverish.

He looked across the compartment at Lupin, too stupefied to be nasty or insulting, or to sneer or do anything but stare blankly. Lupin had progressed from looking sweaty, confused and a touch intimidated, to looking sweaty and . . . thoughtful. If the expression had been on anyone else's face, Severus would have called it 'calculating.'

"Lie down, Lupin," Severus said, "before you pass out. I won't do anything horrible to you . . . probably."

"I'm sure I'd sleep right through it anyway." Lupin hesitantly swung his feet up onto the seat and lay back, just as hesitantly, wincing a little. When he was finally lying prone, his whole body seemed to sink into the seat. Severus recognized the tenor of his sigh: it came from a pain so constant you forgot what it was like not to hurt anymore; all the relief you could seek was a momentary lessening, a moment when you didn't hurt as bad as all the others.

Under his hand, Lily murmured, burrowing a bit into her pillow, her hand coming up to wrap in the fabric at his knees. He let a few strands of her hair slide underneath his nails. She sighed, as if contented, and sank into the hard backs of his knees like Lupin into the cushions.

Severus watched Lupin, at first surreptitiously, and then more obviously when he realized he was not being watched back. He hadn't recalled Lupin's transformations being this bad. He supposed he hadn't been close enough to Lupin then, either physically or in any other way; he hadn't given a damn. Lupin was one of Them; if he'd been suffering, he deserved it, the wretched little werewolf.

He'd seen Lupin get a curse in the back and fall to it, on the slopes of Hogwarts the night Severus died. Dolohov, it had looked like. He had been higher up in the Dark Arts than many of the Death Eaters, but even the Dark Arts couldn't kill a werewolf, who could only truly die by silver and fire . . . of course, all Dolohov would have needed was to conjure a lump of silver to fill the esophagus; but transfiguring the blood to molten silver would have been more his stamp of sadism, if he'd been able to manage it . . . either way, that would have been a wretched way to die, dreadful beyond expression. A great bloody snake would have been a love bite compared to that.

Severus realized the odd sensation in his chest was a stirring of pity for Lupin. Hadn't Bellatrix said—well, "said"; she'd been mad with fury—that Lupin and Nymphadora had had a child? . . . Severus had assumed, when he saw them both at the battle, that something had happened to it . . . although that would be just like a Gryffindor and a Hufflepuff to think their _ideals_ were more important than anything else, even the future of their little werewolf brat. They should have packed up the whelp and headed for the hills, the morons. If Bellatrix found Nymphadora that night, she'd have killed her; of that Severus was certain. Probably the Blood Boiling Curse . . . Bellatrix would have thought that particularly appropriate . . . she'd had plans to use it on Regulus, when he'd defected, but he'd disappeared before she could get to him . . .

Severus realized he was feeling cold, as if he'd walked into an arctic wind. Had a dementor climbed aboard the train? No, he didn't need a dementor; his past was always just beneath the surface of his thoughts. Lily might talk of forgiveness, but Severus' only rest came when he shut his emotions away from himself. Perhaps if he had never lived his own life, if he'd only been a natural Leglimens, dropping into people's thoughts at random, pushed on the swell of their emotions like sea flotsam on the tide, he could have made do without Occlumency; perhaps he could remember more emotions than anger and fear and resentment and malcontent. But if wishes meant anything, he'd be in the afterlife, with a view of the ocean and no memory of dying, a better person than he'd ever been alive, and hopefully happier.

Even magic could grant no power to wishes.

He put his notebook away, sending it drifting up into his trunk. When the latches clicked quietly shut and Lupin's eyes opened, Severus knew he'd never fallen asleep. But the boy didn't say anything, only stared up at the ceiling, the lines on his face and the tired, sightless stare of his eyes speaking to Severus of bone-deep weariness. How had Lupin survived thirty plus years of that curse, if this is what it had made of him at sixteen?

"Lupin," he heard himself say, "have you heard of the Wolfsbane potion?"

 _What?_ he asked himself.

Lupin turned his head toward him on the cushions, blinking his blue-gray eyes. "The what?" he asked, but he only sounded tired. "If it has wolfsbane in it, I don't guess I'd care for it."

"That is the point. It is designed to suppress the mania of the transformation and allow the human consciousness to retain a measure of control."

Lupin went utterly still, as if all the life and consciousness had been removed from him in an instant. He blinked again, a slow, careful movement, and then raised himself onto one arm. The expression on his face as he stared at Severus reminded him, for the first time in all the years he'd been forced to do look at the man, of a wolf. It was wary, but viscerally so, as if instinct were the voice of caution; and overlaying it, like one's reflection on a windowpane, were the human emotions of suspicion and a kind of restrained, desperate hope.

But all Lupin said was, "You're having me on." His voice, though, was low, and it matched the shadow of the wolf on his face.

"I'm not. If you're looking for the catch, it's extremely experimental." Yes, very: it wouldn't be invented for another fifteen years. Damocles Belby's loss was Severus' gain. Possibly Lupin's, as well.

It had been years since Severus had been allowed the luxury of a poor memory. He remembered every step of that potion, complex and frustrating as it was. No, he'd loved the complex ones, the potions that baffled and stunted and required such precision that one stir reversed, one ingredient too heavy meant mortal caution for the drinker, even the brewer . . . Wolfsbane was definitely that.

Lupin's expression hadn't changed, and he was still lying on his side, propped on his elbow, as still as a wild creature who knew one injudicious move could cost it a great deal. "How experimental?"

"The potion does what it advertises," Severus said, "but its long-term effects on . . . the system are unclear. Because there _isn't_ any long term yet."

Lupin watched him narrowly for a few more moments; then he sat up, but as carefully as he'd laid down, placing his feet on the floor and resting his back against the cushions with small, pained winces.

"What do you mean it could affect the syst—"

The door to the compartment banged open. "Moony, _there_ you—"

Severus had his wand out before Black had even started speaking, as soon as he recognized that arrogant, loathsome face, restored now to all its youth and beauty. The only way he'd been able to _bear_ looking at Black when he'd returned from prison was the waste the son of a bitch had endured, the savage destruction of his life reflected in his damaged face. But _this_ was the Black he'd spent ten years of his life loathing with a purity fully justified, this pampered little shit now pointing his wand at Severus; standing with _him_ at his shoulder— _Potter_ —who had his wand out, the useless worm who had not managed to save Lily— _Neither_ of them had, they had let her die. Severus had done everything he could, _given_ her up to them, and they'd _let her die_. He would never forgive them, not if he lived a thousand years and his malice shriveled his soul.

"Wha's going on?" Lily swayed upward, scraping at her hair. She looked from Lupin, who was standing, bracing himself against the seats, to Severus, who had also got to his feet (without realizing it) and was pointing his wand at those two wastes of humanity who were pointing theirs back with expressions on their faces that made Lupin's former confusion look mildly puzzled by comparison.

When Lily saw Potter and Black, she went as rigid as if she'd been transfigured to stone. From his position, Severus couldn't see her face, but he didn't like the way Potter and Black were looking from Lily to him and back again. Severus hadn't lived thirty-eight years without being able to recognize when a fuck-up was brewing.

" _Evans_?" Potter said, at the same time Black said, his eyes narrowed and hard, "Moony, what in all the fucking hells is going on?"

Severus wanted to reply with something shriveling, sarcastic, decimating, but he couldn't speak. Even if he could, the only thing that would have come out of his mouth would probably have been Bellatrix's Blood Boiling Curse. Oh, he could enjoy the thought of Black's and Potter's blood exploding scalding out of their pores . . . he took a moment to do just that, in one part of his mind. But he could never do it, or he'd lose Lily a second time. She might have somehow found it possible to forgive him for many things, however little he could understand it—he even doubted it—but he wasn't a fool.

"We were just talking," Lupin said. His tone was reasonable, a soft echo of the man Severus remembered, but there was a placating undertone to it that made Severus want to kick him in both kneecaps. What Lupin needed wasn't Wolfsbane, but a spine.

"What Lupin is too much of a polite doormat to say," Severus said, not lowering his wand, "is that you two dribbling pricks can go fuck yourselves out of here, because it's none of your fucking business what's going on."

"Sev!" Lily turned huge eyes on him. Severus enjoyed the looks on Black and Potter's faces, although not as much as he'd have done the Blood Boiling Curse. Still, it was a decent enough substitute for the present.

"Yes, I am much too polite to say that," Lupin said, blinking several times. "Padfoot, Prongs, can we go?"

"Evans, what are you doing in here?" Potter persisted. He looked bewildered, even—worried. Severus narrowed his eyes.

Lily stood slowly, so that she was between Severus and the others, which Severus didn't like; he didn't think Potter would ever deliberately hurt her, but unless he was too far off his mark, Black was more than capable of going through Lily to get to Grease-Bag Snivellus.

"Potter," she said in an odd voice, so odd that Severus wasn't sure whether his feverish, inchoate wish was to see her face right then or avoid it, "while I am a bit too ladylike to use Severus' vocabulary, I agree with the sentiment. I'd appreciate it if you'd go."

Potter's eyes flicked from Lily to Severus again. He bit his lip. Black's eyes were still narrow and hard, and he was looking from _Lupin_ to Severus.

"For fuck's sake," Severus barked, "get the out of my compartment before I hex your pricks inside out."

"Go!" Lily took a step backward, bumping into Severus.

"Thanks, Lily," Lupin said suddenly, turning so that he was now facing her between her and his _mates_. "You were right, I really needed the quiet for a bit. I'll see you at the feast." He backed out, waving at her with a fake smile on his face, but his own eyes were wary as he effectively walked backward into Black and Potter and backed them out of the compartment, shutting the door after him.

Neither Lily nor Severus moved right away, perhaps because the Marauding Sons of Bitches weren't moving, either. Lupin had his back pressed right up against the door, and Black and Potter were talking to him, gesturing. Then Black turned and strode off, dragging Lupin after him. Potter lingered for another moment longer, with final anxious look through the window. Severus pointed his wand, bared his teeth, and with a _snap_ slammed the blinds down.

Lily sank down onto the seats, her eyes shut, pale down to her lips. The circles under her eyes looked worse than before. He found himself dropping down next to her, his hand going to her face, seeking some kind of reassurance that she would be well; but of course there was nothing offered in a touch.

Lily turned her head so that her cheek fit into the curve of his palm. His heartbeat dipped, then picked up faster than before. She opened her eyes and looked so tired, but she smiled at him, the barest motion, as if she didn't have the energy to do more.

"I will fix this," he said. _I promise_. "I won't let it harm you."

Lily's smile grew a touch broader. She closed her eyes and said his own words back to him: "Everybody gets hurt," she murmured, tilting to the side until she was resting against his shoulder.

He wondered if that was its own kind of promise.

* * *

 

Remus was grateful to have that episode with Snape to ponder as he staggered across the train to the compartment James and Padfoot had surely damaged as their own. Thoughts of ensuing drama and possible poisonings took his mind off how much everything hurt. One little-known bit of werewolf trivia was that walking on a constantly trembling floor did not ameliorate your post-moon trauma.

"Hoy, you lot," Sirius said curtly, barging into a compartment brimming with sixth-year boys and thin clouds of smoke, "secret meeting, Marauders only, so buggrit off, mates."

"Bugger _you_ and your secret Marauders," said Clive Potter-Pirbright (no relation). "If you want to call a private my-mates-only meeting, Black, I think the loo's open."

The other boys laughed and flicked trash at each other. They were all friends, but Potter-Pirbright had never learned there were times when Sirius wasn't in the mood to be friendly. At the look on Sirius' face, Remus' weak expectations of peace died with a feeble gasp.

"Nah," James said, grinning, "I think Wentworth and Dentworth are in there, locked at the lips. Come on, you lot, Moony needs tenderest rest, look at him." He waved a hand over Remus' head, like he was unveiling a final act.

"Gryffindor's hairy balls, Lupin," Potter-Pirbright said, "what'd you do to yourself? Get on the bad end of one of Black's break-ups?"

"That was me," James said, grinning more widely. "Mate, the stories we could tell you about our holiday . . . but we're not gonna."

He bowed them out the door with many flourishes, calling them glorious gentlemen, purveyors of marvelousness, and great old sods. Leaving Peter behind (who was beaming), the others filed out, nudging and shoving each other, trying to remember who'd chucked Sirius or got chucked by him right before hols.

The moment the door slid shut after Bentworth, the smile slid off James' face. He dropped into the seat next to Peter, looking pale and worried. His hair was actually sticking up more than normal, the way he always tried to get it to do, especially around Lily. Remus had no idea the messiness of James' hair was really influenced by his emotions.

"That stupid arse Pirbright," Sirius chuntered under his breath as he helped Remus to sit. Sirius was strong enough to bear most of Remus' weight as he sank onto the seat, and that made it easier. "Posing tosser, he'd never have what it takes to get into the Marauders if he lived to be a hundred thousand."

Then he glared at Remus, his dark grey eyes like two points in a storm. "Now are you going to tell me what you were doing in a compartment with that shitheel Snivellus? Was he threatening you? If he threatened you I'll have his slimy guts out his huge greasy nostrils—"

"You were with _Snivellus_?" Peter gaped. All the blood in his face rushed into his cheeks; he always blushed when he was scared.

"I was resting," Remus said, wistfully thinking of the silence back there, "not getting threatened at all." Although he wasn't sure what that whole Wolfsbane thing was about . . . surely if Snape was going to poison him, he'd be more deft about it, he'd always been clever and cunning . . .

It was an intoxicating idea, keeping his human mind when he changed, but there was no way Remus was going to drink anything given to him by Snape, even if it came with promises for a full cure, a pot of gold, and the true face of the person he dreamed about on the nights when the moon was dark. When the moon waxed full, Remus only dreamed of running.

"Lily brought me there," he explained when the tight anger on Sirius' face didn't dissipate, nor the worry on James', nor the blushing fear on Peter's. "She said Snape would have found someplace quiet and I should come along. I think you berks were letting off fireworks in here when we went past." There was still a strong stench of burning sulfur hanging in the air.

"Why was Evans with him?" James said before Sirius could get out any more insults and threats on Snape's head. "I mean— _why_? After what he called her—"

Sirius snorted. "Yeah, and in front of half the year. Finally cracked, she has."

"Evans isn't cracked," James said hotly. "She's just—" He didn't seem to know what. "Moony, you were there, what was going _on_? She had her—she was lying—" He was starting to blush. James was a bit of a prude.

"Prude," Sirius said, not mincing matters. "So what if she had her head on his lap? You ought to try getting a girl there sometimes."

"She—what?" squeaked Peter, now going red all over. " _Snivellus_?"

Remus sighed. "She was _sleeping_ , you prats. She looked exhausted. I think she's been ill."

"Moony, if the pair of you competed in the un-beauty contest today, there'd be a tie," Sirius said bluntly.

"Evans is sick?" Peter looked from one to the other of them in surprise. "And she's hanging around with Snivellus again and—sleeping on him?" He started blushing again.

"That about sums it up," Sirius said indifferently, although this catalogue of horrors made James look more anguished than before.

"It doesn't make any sense!" he burst out, looking like he wanted to beat his fists against the furniture. "After he called her a— and Wormtail, remember what you told me, that Macdonald said Evans _admitted_ Snape wants to be a Death Eater? She's been acting like he didn't exist all year, _finally_ , and now suddenly she's— Moony, you have to see how—weird that is!"

"It's weird when you put it like that," Remus said, closing his eyes and resting his head against the seat back.

" _Thank_ you—"

"But not when you remember they've been friends for ages. Macdonald also said he tried to apologize and Lily wouldn't listen."

"Right," James said swiftly, "she wouldn't listen! And straight before hols she was still ignoring the fact that he was even _alive_ —"

"So she's changed her mind now," Sirius said. Remus wondered if he was the only one who heard the weariness in Sirius' voice. He was pretty sure he was the only one who knew how much Sirius resented James' Lily-obsession. Peter would have blabbed, and James would have been hurt.

"Maybe Snivellus made her," Peter said suddenly.

Something in his tone had Remus opening his eyes. Peter was holding rather still, his gaze flitting from Remus to Sirius to James, and finally resting on James. "If he wants to be a Death Eater, he'll know all kinds of evil magic to get people to do . . . things . . . won't he?"

Remus opened his eyes all the way. Next to him, Sirius sat with his arms crossed, not moving. All the blood was draining from James' face.

"I mean, think about it," Peter went on, his expression somehow sharpening. "And he's pretty good with potions—he could either curse her or mix up something, and she'd have to do whatever he wanted. I bet he was getting tired of her ignoring him, acting like she was better than him—he's probably done something to make her friends with him again. Friends and . . . you know." And he blushed again.

Remus felt something nasty balling in his stomach. Not because he thought this was true _necessarily_ , but because he could tell, looking into James' face, that he _did_ —or he would, in about two seconds, unless—

Sirius snorted. The ball of nastiness in Remus' stomach stopped growing. But it winced when Sirius said: "I bet Snivellus knows how to Imperio and love-potion birds with his eyes shut—it's the only way he and his fucking Death Eaters could get anything but each other's arses. But Moony's right, if you ask me. Think about it, Prongs—when has Evans _ever_ seen that Snivellus was as much of a shit as everyone knows he is?"

"All last term!" James said, spots of color in his face, but whether it was from his indignation or Sirius' graphic language, Remus didn't know. "That's what we've been _saying_!"

Sirius shrugged. "So she had a period of Lucite."

"Lucidity," Remus corrected automatically. "Lucite is acrylic glass."

"Thanks ever so, you well-read ponce." He shot Remus a half smile, on the corner of his mouth James wouldn't see across the compartment. " _Lucidity_ , as Moony has oh so helpfully corrected me. Evans had it for a bit. Now Snivellus has done one of his world-class suck-arse acts and she's forgiven him. He'll go back to stalking her all over the castle like the creep he is and she'll go back to not realizing he's a slimy shit, and all will be as it was before, with rainbows and puppies and shit."

"If he's got her under a love potion," Remus added, "he must have forgotten, because when she lay down on him, I think he was more shocked than _I_ was." _And I thought post-moon had finally driven me mad_.

"Maybe he Obliviated her," Peter said. He didn't look one bit like his faith in Snape's coercion had been shaken. And unfortunately, neither did James.

 _Oh, hell_ , Remus thought sadly. Their only hope of heading this off had been Sirius' convincing James it was a worthless idea.

"Peter's right, he's done something to her," James persisted. Remus recognized the stubborn set of his jaw. "He has to have done. Moony, I get what you're saying, but Evans looks really bad and she's friends with Snape again—those two things have to do with each other, I know they have." His eyes glinted behind his glasses: determination. "And I'm going to figure out why."

 _So much for a peaceful term_ , Remus thought with a silent moan of fatigue. "Fine, Prongs," he said wearily. "You do that. When Lily hexes you six ways from Sunday, Padfoot and I will float you down to the hospital wing for patching up."

"You'll help, Padfoot," James said, widening his eyes at Sirius. "You will, right? Evans is a Gryffindor—we can't let that greasy slimeball hurt her."

"Of course I'll help, Prongs," Sirius said, because he always would. If James wanted to cut off their feet and hike across the Himalayas, Sirius would agree without blinking. He'd even bring the machete.

But Remus definitely heard the note of weariness in Padfoot's voice that time.

* * *

 

It always seemed to be raining, these days.

 _Fucking Evans,_ Sirius thought moodily. Not even a full day into the new term, and already she was giving him a headache. Her and fucking Snivellus.

He wished he had a fag. He'd taken up smoking that summer, wanting something to do at the Potters, something to take his mind off things. When he smoked, he was able to think about things like his father's wand dropping black-red curls of Dark magic and his mother screaming and Regulus clawing at his arm and sobbing, _Sirius, don't leave, please don't leave_ as if they were manageable memories, nothing to get worked up over. Without wanting to break everything in sight he could think about the fact that Regulus' begging had been the first thing he'd said to Sirius in five years that wasn't nasty or sneering or smugly superior about being the favorite son; the last thing he might ever say, now that Sirius had left home and wound up with the blood-traitor Potters. Sirius could never, ever hate James, but there had been times, especially last summer, when he saw the way James' parents loved him, how _much_ they did, and he'd have given anything not to be Sirius Black but some second Potter son who never really knew how good he had it.

Prongs knew just a bit, because he'd seen the inside of the Black mausoleum. He'd grown quiet at the sight of the slack, sagging house-elf heads and the threadbare faces on the tapestry that sneered at Sirius, the Gryffindor, the one whom whispers of _blood traitor_ followed through the drawing-rooms of that hearse just like his parents' disappointed, watchful eyes. That was the day when Prongs had turned to Sirius and said, "Padfoot, you know I'd give you anything, you know that, right? You wouldn't even need to say. Just, you know, show up and—look me in the eye—and I'll know."

And Sirius had, and the Potters had spent every morning of the summer hols smiling at him; and to take Sirius' mind off things James had shown him how to sneak off his family's wild, rolling property, down to the Muggle village a few leagues away, where Sirius saw a pretty Muggle girl smoking and wanted to try it. When he asked if he could bum one, she'd given him the fag from her lips, stained with a crimson ring from her lipstick, and lit another. Sirius had thought the way she looked at him through those acrid curls of smoke had been the sexiest fucking thing he'd ever seen.

So Sirius learned to smoke, and he still did it even though Moony hated it and gave him disapproving looks and said dryly that one day Sirius was going to stash a lit fag behind his ear and set his hair on fire.

He was fine with Moony's glowers and lectures about lung cancer (some Muggle thing he must hear about from his doctory mum every night at dinner). Moony could be kind of a swot, but Sirius had long ago decided that was one of Moony's charms, like turning into a bloodthirsty monster once a month with the power to rip off your arms and beat you to death with them. It took a special kind of person to be both a bloodthirsty monster _and_ a swot. And there were times when Remus was holding a wand and he got a glint in his eye and Sirius knew Remus had the power to _hex_ your arms off and beat you bloody with them, only he didn't, because he was Moony and he'd never do a thing like that. Moony was a marshmallow inside a werewolf inside a swot. Moony was—well, he was special.

Evans was a pretty enormous swot too, but of a different sort. Sirius didn't like Evans' swottery at all. In fact, if Prongs hadn't taken a whopping mad fancy to her in a fit of lunacy, Sirius would have hexed her a time or five, just for being aggravating and self-righteous and bloody all-around annoying. Prongs thought it was mad and daft that Evans and Snivellus were mates; he would run around the common room and tear his hear if you let him get going; but as far as Sirius was concerned, she and Snivellus were made for each other. Privately, he called her Mrs. Snivellus. He'd never told even Moony that, though, because Moony got all frowny when they ragged on Snape, even though Sirius would bet his balls Snape would never do the same if he heard his fucking Death Eater mates talking about nasty half-breed werewolves and how they should all be put the fuck down, in the open where everyone could watch and know they were really dead, for good. Sirius knew how people like that talked . . .

And then Sirius, who was supposed to take care of Moony, had gone and told that slimy shit how to get to Remus, and he'd _found out_ . . .

There were times when Sirius thought he must've been mad, utterly lost his mind, to have done that, to have put Moony in that kind of danger. It was like he'd been possessed, like his miserable old man had climbed inside his head and warped him enough to do it. The world would have been a better place with one less Death Eater on its face, it always would be, but a world without Moony in it, a world where Moony suffered and died, wouldn't have anything right in it ever again.

It figured it would take the worst thing almost happening for him to figure that out. There was life for you.

Of course it was fucking raining in Hogsmeade, too. The whole world seemed to be filled with rain these days, icy and miserable and dark. He'd felt the cold even at the Potters, felt it pressing against the windows, against the warmth from Prongs and Charlus and Dorea and Moony. Sirius hadn't told Prongs why he left that summer; he'd only said he couldn't take it anymore, so Prongs didn't know how the world was getting darker and darker, like a polar night. But Sirius knew, and he had two full cartons of Pall Mall's in his trunk, for the nights when he had trouble sleeping from the memories of hushed voices curling through his family's drawing rooms like cigarette smoke.

He helped Moony down from the train, taking care to hold him up without squeezing too hard. Prongs tried, but Prongs could never do it right, and Wormtail was a first-rate bumbler. The last time Sirius'd let him help, Wormtail had dropped a trunk on Moony's foot and broken three of his metatarsal bones. Sirius had given Wormtail a good cuff upside the head for that, sworn at him until he cried. He sighed, just remembering. Poor fucking Wormtail—couldn't catch a break even from himself. From then on Sirius had taken primary responsibility of Moony, since Prongs and Wormtail, bless them, were such duffers about him.

"Here you are, Moony," Sirius said, pulling Remus' hood up over his sweaty hair. "Got a nice sleety drizzle for you—I owled in ahead and ordered it specially for you, how do you like?"

"It was lovely and thoughtful of you, Padfoot, but next time I'd prefer chocolates." Moony leaned on him like he was trying not to lean as much as he really wanted.

"With the raspberry filling?"

"Mmm," Moony said, probably dreaming about gobbling the entire stash.

"And naked birds on the box?"

"Are you going to charm them on there again? I know for a fact, Mr. Sirius Black, that there is no store in Hogsmeade that sells raspberry-crème-filled chocolates in heart-shaped boxes with naked birds on the front, diddling themselves."

Sirius grinned. "It'd be repeating myself anyway."

He pulled his hood forward so the cold-as-fuck drizzle wouldn't hit him in the eyes. A few strides ahead, Peter wheeled his and Moony's trunks through the mud while Prongs handled his own and Sirius'. Most of the train stock had rushed ahead to get out of the shitty weather and not a lot of carriages were left. Some second-year birds were fighting and squealing to get into one of the few still standing.

Probably because Snivellus was standing at the one next to them, propping up Evans the way Sirius was doing Moony.

"Bollocks," Moony mutter-sighed, apparently spotting them, too. "Has James already—"

"Yeah." Sirius sighed, too. He watched Prongs dash through the slushy mud toward Evans and groaned. "Moony, I don't want to fuck with this tonight. Why can't he just find a bird who'll actually like him?"

"I think if you could answer that," Moony said, sounding just barely amused, "you'd solve a mysterious question about the whole human race."

"Evans!" It looked like Prongs splattered Evans and Snivellus with mud when he skidded to a stop in front of them. "How are you feeling?"

"Like getting in out of the rain, Potter," Evans said, sounding tired even from Sirius' distance. She was Mrs. Snivellus all right. The greasy oik was even smirking, probably proud as piss of his snippy little woman. "If you'll excuse me." She turned away.

"You could ride with us," said Prongs, Gryffindor all the way. Sometimes Sirius wished Prongs was Gryffindor only nine-tenths of the way.

Snivellus was giving Prongs a look of total, scornful confusion, like he couldn't believe anyone could be this fuckwitted. Sirius wanted to punch his huge schnozz down his throat, and not just because he kind of agreed. Why did Prongs have to act like such a tonker around Evans— _because_ of Evans—bloody Mrs. Snivellus?

"I'm riding with Severus, Potter," Evans said without turning around. "And I would like to get in the carriage and up to the school, it's freezing out here. Remus looks like he feels even more the same way, so if we could all get going?"

She put her hand on the door to climb into the carriage. Sirius watched as Snivellus helped her inside in a way that, had he been talking about anyone else on the planet, Sirius would have called _tender_.

This whole night was weird as fuck.

Snape got in after her. He leaned out to swing the door shut—and as he did, he looked at the four of them with a slow, knowing smile, like a Sphinx who'd given you a riddle it knew you couldn't solve, and it was just waiting for the day it would get to eat you.

Then he slammed the door in their faces, and the Snivellus Wedding Carriage clopped off through the mud.

They stood there, the four of them, the great Marauders with sleeting drizzle pissing onto their covered heads and freezing mud soaking up their robes. Prongs stared after the carriage. Then he whirled around, clearly searching the road for his traitorous best mate, but Sirius had kept standing back from the scene of the disaster, his arms around Moony to hold him up.

"You were supposed to help me!" Prongs said, sounding half frustrated, half pleading.

"I took a gander at the situation and deduced you didn't need my help making an ass of yourself." With a jab of his wand Sirius banged open the door to the last carriage and pushed Moony inside. But he _tried_ to sound sympathetic, not as cold and one-hundred-fifty-percent unsupportive as he felt. "Come on, Prongs, you chose a shit moment. I'm sorry, mate," he said, and meant it, because for whatever bizarro reason, Prongs really did get upset when Evans snubbed him like she always did. "But it's true. You'll have plenty more opportunities to arse things up tomorrow." He thumped Prongs between the shoulder blades, but Prongs' expression didn't clear up. _Fucking Mrs. Snivellus._

"Even at the feast, maybe," Wormtail offered, all encouragement. "Er, that is . . . I mean, she'll have to sit at Gryffindor table, and Snivellus will be off at Slytherin, Prongs, you know."

"What a grand old time we'll all have then," said Sirius, sending all their trunks up to lash themselves to the roof.

Prongs huffed and didn't seem placated, but that was the way he always acted about Mrs. Snivellus. No, actually it was getting worse the older he got.

Sirius climbed onto the tatty seat next to Moony, who was slumped against the squabs, shivering. Sirius transfigured an old boot lace someone had dropped to the floor into a fluffy red scarf and wrapped it around sickly old Moony, tucking the ends down the front of his cloak. Remus slit his eyes open and smiled at him, just a little bit, but it was enough.

* * *

 

Severus savored the look on Potter's face as the carriage lurched away. He knew he would be savoring it for a long time, a very long time to come . . . once Lily moved back into the Marauders' orbit and became _theirs_ again, Potter's slack confusion and despairing fury were some of the only things Severus would have for his own. Lily would hex Severus' head on backwards if she knew how he thought of her as belonging to those shits, but they all belonged to each other, in that group.

Severus had grown adept at telling who belonged and who was only on the outside, looking in.

He couldn't immediately think why she would act towards Potter as she had in the train car and out on the road. Perhaps she was trying to reconstruct the disdain she remembered feeling for him at this stage in their lives . . . or perhaps it had to do with the fact that she was really dealing with the sixteen-year-old forerunner to her husband. That had to be—uncomfortable. Two weeks ago she had been _married_ to the man that arrogant bully would become; nominally married, Severus suspected, to all four of the arrogant little buggers. Take one and you took them all—it had always seemed it would be that way, from his understanding.

Which would have made Pettigrew's betrayal all the more wrenching . . .

He looked down at her, where she lay half across his chest. As soon as he'd shut the door and sat back against the squabs, she had wrapped her arms around his waist and burrowed into his chest. "Put your arms around me, would you?" she mumbled, and he had, wondering if he hated this or loved it. No, it was definitely hatred; she was most likely only seeking relief from belittling her _husband_ and having to look her traitor in the face.

She confirmed his theory a few seconds later. "God, that was horrible," she muttered. She was speaking through clenched teeth. At first he thought it was from anger or misery, but then he realized she was pressing them together to keep them from chattering; she was shivering all over, in tiny pulses.

He began to be seriously alarmed; the inside of the carriage was cold, but not to a crippling degree, and Lily had always been more warm-blooded than himself. He rubbed one hand down her back, the other across her shoulder, wondering if that would help. It seemed to make her relax, and yes, to reduce her shivers to occasional . . . but when he touched his fingers to the back of her neck, he felt that she was warm. Yet her teeth kept chattering, and she shivered against him, and made a small, faint complaining noise when the warming friction from his hand ceased.

His hope sank as his dread rose. Her cold was not coming from an outside source; it was internal.

That meant a curse.

And Light curses did not manifest in this way.

"It will be all right," he said in a low voice, staring out the window without taking much in. As dark as the lane was from Hogsmeade to Hogwarts, all he could see were flashes of darkness where the lanterns swinging from the carriage rails glistened on a tree.

"I know . . . " she murmured, sounding half asleep. "I'm just tired . . . but you're here . . . you'll stay . . . it'll be . . . "

And then she seemed to slip away again. Her breath was not regular as it wafted across his collarbone, and it was shallow, but she did not seem to be awake either.

He frowned into the darkness. He was glad he'd sent a note ahead to Madam Pomfrey, stopping some third-year girl to use her owl; but he was aware that his knowledge of Dark curses and their cures was more extensive than any one else's at Hogwarts at this point. Except perhaps Dumbledore's, but even then, Severus thought he might have the edge. The Headmaster had a powerful grasp of the way magic _worked_ , an understanding that went far beyond Severus', but when it came to a specific catalogue of Dark spells, curses and cures, Severus thought his was the greater.

But that assumption had been based on Dumbledore's dislike of the practical Dark Arts, and thinking of Contrapasso, Severus wasn't so certain anymore . . .

The problem was that while Severus was confident he could cure Lily with a proper diagnosis, he had no idea what she had been cursed with. For that, Dumbledore would most likely be the better wizard. Even if he hadn't studied the Dark Arts the way Severus had, with feverish devotion in his youth and respect in his later years, Dumbledore had seen more; he had lived so much longer. And Severus' primary concern had always been how to _inflict_ Dark curses and how to reverse anything negative that happened to himself and his closest comrades. In the early stages, many curses looked alike. He would need to wait for Lily's particular symptoms to manifest before he could know what she was suffering . . .

With the Dark Arts, by the time the curse showed itself in its truest form, it was always too late.

The more he thought about it, the more it seemed he might have to bring Lily to Dumbledore. While this was not remotely what he wished to do, her safety and wellness were paramount. He and the Headmaster may have been nominal enemies at this time—Severus as part of those one-day genocidal supremacists, Dumbledore the shadowed general for the Light—but Dumbledore was more than sharp enough to notice drastic changes in Severus' behavior. Dumbledore had not only the mind arts; he was clever and canny, and he had Severus under his watchful eye ten months of the year. If _Lupin_ was giving him funny looks, even . . . and Black's face when Severus had smiled at them, before slamming the carriage door . . .

Apparently Severus couldn't resist the temptation to show off. He had to admit that even had he been able to replicate the behavior of his seventeen-year-old self, he wouldn't have. He loathed teenagers. His adolescent self wasn't exempt from his disgust by a long shot; he didn't _want_ to go back to acting that way.

The carriage lurched to a gentle halt. Past its thin walls he heard the slamming of doors, the patter of falling rain, the shrieking of the demented students, and what sounded like Peeves wreaking havoc. Severus consoled himself with the reminder that at least now he would no longer have to bring the little bastards into line and get them to behave, a task so miserable even the pleasure of terrorizing them couldn't make it attractive.

Lily made to help as he maneuvered her down from the carriage, but she slipped on the slick fold-out steps and it was only the fact that he'd been standing within an arm's reach that stopped her from crashing headfirst to the ground. She dropped like a sack into his arms.

To hell with their trunks. He hoisted her into his arms and carried her up the front steps.

This was not as simple as it sounded: overexcited students roiled about, encouraged to mania by Peeves, and the steps were treacherous with patches of ice and puddles of water and _wet_ patches of ice. At least as at seventeen Severus was finally getting taller than most of the hyperactive gumboils.

"Sev, what are you doing?" Lily asked weakly, but her head lolled against his chest.

"Don't break my concentration," he said shortly, navigating around a patch of cavorting fourth-year boys, "or it'll be both our necks. Watch it, you cretins!" he barked at the boys, who spun around at the sound of his voice and knocked into each other trying to scatter.

A stream of icy rain gushed over his socks, flowing down an old path gouged in the steps from where it came pouring out of a gargoyle's spout. He could definitely hear Peeves—flying low in the crowd and pulling on people's shoelaces, it sounded like.

"Stebbins!" a very, very familiar voice barked from the top of the stairs. "If you do not stop doing that, I will put you in detention for the first month of the term! Go on, Miss Davies, it is only a little water, you won't melt—PEEVES! I see that!" (Peeves' reply was lost in the chaos, but Severus would bet it was almost as rude as his speech to the Marauders.)

Severus glared a miniscule first-year out of his way to gain the head of the stairs. Minerva turned, probably only from coincidence, and looked startled to see Severus only half an arm's length away from her. "Mr. Snape, what are you—is that Miss _Evans_?"

"I sent an owl to Madam Pomfrey," Severus said curtly. "Did she get it?"

Minerva stared at him, but her tone showed nothing out of the ordinary: "Being as I am not Madam Pomfrey, Mr. Snape, you will have to find the woman who is." She pointed through the doors behind her. "Take Miss Evans up to the hospital wing—if I see Madam Pomfrey, I will tell her where you've gone."

"Thank you," Severus said, although it came out as curtly as before; and then, feeling distinctly bizarre: "Professor." Then he beetled off before he could do anything else incriminating; Minerva was wearing a truly odd expression on her face as he left.

Damn, how had he acted toward her as a sixth year? _Would_ he have thanked her? He couldn't remember, but it would seem not . . . she might have sewn his expelled entrails back into his gut and he'd just have sneered . . . she was Head of Gryffindor, after all, and he'd hated Transfiguration; and of course, there was all that budding Death Eater garbage . . .

This was all too complicated.

He skirted the Great Hall, its doors open, warmth and cacophony and light spilling out, and up the main stairs into the vault of staircases, which shifted above his head with the slow scrape of stone. Had Lily not been half a dead weight in his arms, he would have stopped; looked at every one of the windows still unbroken, listened to the susurration of a thousand painted conversations; even the grating shriek of excited children, because it was all part of the Hogwarts he remembered and had never been able to create after the night when Albus was gone. Death Eaters had walked the halls of Hogwarts, and the Dark Lord had walked through Severus' heart, breaking everything he touched.

"Congratulations," Lily whispered.

For a wild second he thought she was congratulating him on finding that Hogwarts again, but of course that was daft. He looked down at her face, which she'd turned up toward him. She smiled. Her skin looked translucent.

"On remembering to call her 'Professor,'" she said, still whispering. Her hand lay over his heart. He wondered if it was beating at all. "Not 'Minerva.'"

"It will take some adjusting yet," Severus said, and began the slow climb with her to the hospital wing.


	14. Chapter 14

"Padfoot . . . " Remus watched the doors of the Great Hall float past as he was, for some reason, dragged toward the main staircase. "The Great Hall is sailing off the port bow."

"We're not going to the Great Hall," Sirius said, pushing his wet bangs out of his grey eyes, "we're going to the hospital wing. I don't want you dropping face-first into my butternut squash. Madam Pomfrey can pour lots of foul potions down your throat and set you up in a nice bed with a nice tray, doesn't that sound fucking magniferous?"

"It sounds _nice_ ," Remus said, although the last thing he wanted was to pick up his feet to scale several floors to the hospital wing. He'd been concentrating as hard as he could just to get to his seat at Gryffindor table. "But Pads . . . "

"I can see you want to argue." Sirius paused to wave at James and Peter—or Peter, because James had already gone striding into the hall with single-minded determination. Or Lily-minded determination. "But I can also see, from my amazing powers of seeing shit, that you have no arguments to argue with."

Then he hoisted Remus onto his back. "Climb aboard the Padfoot Express," he said. "Oof. No strangling your conductor, Moony."

"Sorry." Remus loosened his grip, which had latched convulsively onto Sirius' throat when he'd suddenly found himself airborne. "Let that be a warning to the conductor on the suitability of grabbing his passengers off the floor with no warning."

"I'll make sure to scream it in your ear next time, how's that." He hooked his arm around one of Remus' legs, swaying them slightly as he tried to find the other. "Have you suddenly become a mono-ped? Where's your other leg?"

Remus was laughing as he tried not to fall off, accidentally strangle Sirius, or brain them both toppling backward down the stairs. "You know, you _could_ conjure the invalid a stretcher—might be easier—just a thought."

"Boring," Sirius said in tones of disgust. "There's no way a boring bloody stretcher can get you up the stairs more spectacularly than the Padfoot Express."

"I think there are a million ways," Remus said as they lurched up the first flight. "Please don't kill us, Mr. Conductor."

"What I want to know, Moony, is how you can weigh like a sack of wet cement when you look like a bundle of twigs."

"Innate talent."

Sirius still didn't let him down, even when they got to the hospital wing floor. And then he carried Remus piggyback up to the door, and through it. Remus was laughing, in a totally helpless way, until he saw a familiar face and nose and pair of black eyes giving him a surprised, scornful stare.

Sirius stopped dead. His grip on Remus' legs tightened; Remus could feel Sirius' shoulders turn to an iron rod beneath the bones of Remus' chest.

Snape sat in a chair to the left of a mint-green sound-muffling curtain, his legs crossed at the ankles, his elbows resting on the chair's arms and his fingers steepled in front of him. The look was very . . . affected, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on an older man, not a teenager. And yet something about it . . . there was something weird about it, or about Snape . . . Remus couldn't explain it, but he felt like some expectation of his had been jolted.

Even if he didn't agree with Peter's Dark curse theory—and he didn't know why, he just _didn't_ , it didn't add right—there was definitely something different about Snape, an unidentified quality almost as weird as Lily turning around and being close with him again; closer than before.

But Remus knew the anguish of being apart from someone, even when you were so angry with them you wanted to see them _hurt_ , when you wanted to be the one who hurt them. There was a time when you had to make a choice between what hurt you more: forgiving them or not.

Remus felt himself sliding to the floor as Sirius finally loosened his grip. He used Sirius to balance himself, trying to glance up into Sirius' face without being obvious about it. The hard, narrow-eyed look had come back, and Remus hated that look. A lot. Sirius didn't usually get it when dealing with Snape; he usually treated his and James' attacks like little larks, not much worse than the pranks they pulled on anyone, even though they _were_.

But when that hard look came into his face Remus felt sick inside, because when Sirius got like that, someone always got really hurt, and usually not the person he'd intended. The last time had involved a lot of the people in this room.

Remus looked fearfully across the hospital wing toward Snape, who was settling in his chair, folding his hands back into the steeple. As he did, Madam Pomfrey popped out from behind the muffling curtain, her look of curiosity fading to understanding, and then to worry.

"Oh Mr. Lupin," she said, shaking her head but coming forward readily. "I _thought_ I might see you."

She pointed her wand at a bed as far across the ward from Snape as she could manage, folding back the blankets with a silent spell. Madam Pomfrey remembered.

"Well," Remus said, smiling at her, trying to pretend Snape wasn't there listening to every word and Sirius' arm wasn't like iron under his hand, "I missed you scolding me. It's just not the same when anyone else does it."

He pinched Sirius' arm through the coarse cloth of his school robes. Sirius pushed him toward the bed, but he still hadn't looked away from Snape; still didn't, even as Remus dragged him into the circle of the muffling curtain Madam Pomfrey was drawing around the bed.

"Why is Snivellus here?" Sirius asked abruptly, as soon as the curtains' ends had met.

Madam Pomfrey raised her eyebrows. "Can you not ask Mr. Snape, Mr. Black?" she asked, putting a gentle hand on Remus' shoulder to guide him down to the pillow. As she did, a faint cushioning charm settled against his back, gradually dissipating as he sank down.

Sirius didn't answer, just regarded her with narrowed eyes. Madam Pomfrey said, "No? Then I suppose it's not your business. That is only a professional opinion, you understand."

When she waved her wand over Remus in a complicated net of figure-eights, the glowing lines of Remus' vitals flickered into being above him. He watched them with polite disinterest, trying to compare them to something nicer than a catalogue of everything that hurt.

"Gracious Rowena, Mr. Lupin." Madam Pomfrey's expression creased. "What did you do to yourself last night?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary," he said weakly. "Sometimes they're just . . . bad."

"Yes," she said after a pause. Her hand brushed across his forehead as if checking for temperature, even though her diagnostic net would have told her if he had a fever. He closed his eyes for a second longer than a blink, wishing she were his mother. But Muggles couldn't come to Hogwarts; their systems couldn't handle the power of the magic that melded with the air. Dumbledore had only allowed her across the threshold once, after a particularly bad moon in Remus' second year; the first time he had relaxed the stipulation since becoming Headmaster. But Dumbledore had forcibly removed her when she started bleeding from the ears, and then she'd slapped him and said in a hard voice that he wasn't taking her away from her son. It was one of Remus' more horrible memories, even with all the transformations stitched together as one long tapestry, going back as far as he could remember.

"Well, get some rest, dear." Madam Pomfrey tucked the blankets around him with a kind of deft tenderness. "It's not the most auspicious start to the year, but with a good night's rest and some food in you, you'll be on the mend. You will stay with Mr. Lupin, Mr. Black," she added; Remus, eyes still closed, imagined the stern jab of her wand in Sirius' direction. "Keep him company and don't get too rowdy, or I'll have you out on your ear."

"As long as Snivellus keeps his greasy beak away from us, I can behave," Sirius said.

Madam Pomfrey did not deign to reply. She said, "Drink these, Remus dear," pointing to a tray of multicolored potions when he opened his eyes to look. Then she whisked herself out of the muffled barrier behind the curtain, which did its job so well, all the sound of her presence vanished into nothing.

Remus was a dreadful Potions student, not having scraped even Exceeds Expectations to continue for a N.E.W.T., but he knew these potions as well as, if not better, than even Slughorn did. The cobalt blue potion that seemed to glitter from the inside was a pain potion. The one in sepia was a muscle relaxant. The opalescent gray bottle held a powerful sleeping draught whose only magic was the ability to prolong deep sleep for ten strong hours exactly, because sleep healed on its own. All his body wanted to do after every moon was sleep.

Sirius didn't tell him to take his potions, even though he was leaning across Remus to pick up each bottle and scrutinize it. Sirius would remember how the potions made all Remus' food taste like a blend of insect wings and grass roots, and that Remus always ate before he took even the analgesic.

"Well?" Remus asked, as Sirius put down the sleep potion with a _clink_. "How do they look?"

"You're better at telling than me. And not because you knock 'em back every month," he added. "I dunno how you get so hopeless at Potions when you can tell the strength of your painkiller from how glittery it is." Sirius gave him a look of exasperated fondness, the same way he did whenever Remus nagged him about smoking or not doing his homework or jinxing first-years' fingers up their nose for sitting in the good chairs by the fire when Remus was looking for a place to study.

"Honestly, potions are even more boring than Binns. I really only know these from staring at them for so long."

"Whatever, Moony," Sirius said, rolling his eyes. "You can keep talking down to yourself, but it'll never be true."

"Well," Remus said, making his voice grave, "we can't all be impenetrably arrogant."

"Swot," Sirius said without rancor, one corner of his mouth curving up, as it had on the train. "You're lucky you're so sickly and weak or I'd give you big girly hug."

The curtains whispered aside and Madam Pomfrey re-appeared, wafting a tray of sick werewolf food: mostly meat—steak—with a side of broth. There was also a plate of chicken and potatoes, which Remus assumed was for Sirius.

"Since I know you're not about to leave the wing in peace, Mr. Black," Madam Pomfrey said, settling the tray over Remus' knees. "And I've other patients that need as much rest as Mr. Lupin."

"Evans?" Sirius said casually.

Madam Pomfrey gave no indication that she'd heard him. "Take your potions when you're done, Mr. Lupin, and set the tray to the side." Then she slipped around the edge of the curtain and was gone again into the silence.

"What do you think, Moony?" Sirius asked, still casual, as he batted Remus' hands away from his silverware (not real silver, of course) and started to carve into the steak. "Do you think it's Evans Snivellus is oh so concernedly watching over like a great greasy bat?"

"I think if you speculate any more where Pomfrey can hear you, she'll turn your ears into leeks."

Sirius made as if to fork a bite of steak into Remus' mouth, but at the last moment veered and ate it himself. He grinned as he chewed, then speared another bite and handed the fork off to Remus.

"At last," Remus said tartly.

"Come on, Moony," Sirius said, now abusing a leg of chicken. "It's Evans, isn't it? Got to be, the way she was looking at the station—and the way _he_ was acting—"

"I don't know why you're bothering to ask me if you already know."

"I don't _know_ ," Sirius said with a frown. "It's _because_ I don't know that I'm _speculating_. Come on, you're the one of us who's good at solving a mystery—if any of us'd been the werewolf, it wouldn't have taken you two bloody years to suss it out."

Remus sighed. "Flattering me to get me participating?" Sirius gave him a grin that was objectively charming, but Remus didn't want to be charmed right now, not by a smile, because the benefit of that always faded too fast. He didn't want to think about the hours of _speculation_ and scheming that would rise out of this Snape-Lily thing like the steam from a smoking cauldron. He could just see James working himself into a frenzy of fear and worry, Peter feeding it with Dark magic theories, and Sirius looking hard-eyed and narrow at Snape because he hated him and all the people like him.

"If Snape is here with Lily," Remus said, careful to make it sound like his words were no big deal, "then I think it's nice he's here for her when she's sick." _Like you're here for me,_ he wanted to add, but he'd never quite dared to compare Sirius to Snape, not to Sirius' face, even though the ways they were alike sometimes filled Remus with disquiet.

Sirius' stare was incredulous. "Moony, if you're thinking Snape's got emotions like a normal person, your brains have done a runner."

"Of course he has emotions like a normal person," Remus said, bewildered. "Most people do, Padfoot."

Perhaps the light in the wing had shifted as Madam Pomfrey put down a lamp, because there seemed to be a shadow lying across Sirius' face that hadn't been there a moment before. But Remus knew it wasn't really a darkness you could take away by moving a light.

"Normal people don't turn into fucking Death Eaters, Remus."

Remus realized he was no longer hungry. The food tasted like it had turned to insect wings and grass roots in his mouth.

He wished he wouldn't ever find out if he was right about that hard look and the shadows. There were things that Sirius didn't talk about but that Remus thought he knew anyway, just as he didn't need an almanac or a star chart to know when the moon was filling with reflected light. The question was, were they the same? Did both of these things he knew down to his bones mean monsters rising out of your skin, transforming you into someone your conscious mind refused to see?

"I think they do," he said quietly. "That's what's so scary."

* * *

 

As soon as Madam Pomfrey shoved Black and Lupin behind a muffling-curtain, Severus slipped behind Lily's. She was half-sitting up in the bed, slumped against the metal headboard, her hand pressed against her forehead.

"Where'd Pomfrey go?" she mumbled.

"To see to Lupin, carried tenderly over the threshold by his devoted dog of a boyfriend."

Lily rolled her eyes, but only to look up at him without turning her head. "Ha, ha," she said, barely smiling, but as though she weren't aware of doing it. That was odd; she should have scolded him for that. Perhaps she was too tired. "Which of them have you cast in _that_ role? Wait, did you say _dog_?" She hitched herself up, her eyes wide.

"Yes, I know Black is an Animagus." He was surprised that she'd ask, but not as surprised as he was a moment later, to have his hand seized and himself pulled down next to her. Overbalanced and caught off-guard, he almost fell on her, but he managed to grasp the bed frame and keep himself upright, if precarious, on the edge of the mattress. Lily's arms snaked around him like Devil's Snare, and she curled into his chest, her hair tickling his collarbone above the neck of his robes.

"If Madam Pomfrey comes back and finds us like this," he told her, "she'll jettison me from the wing."

"I won't let her," Lily mumbled, her fingers curling tightly into his robes. "I'll tell her I need you here."

"Is it your fear of my being ambushed by half of Slytherin"— _or your husband and his cronies—_ "that's making you so clingy? There's no one in here but us, Pomfrey and the canine lovers."

"Git," she murmured. "They're not. Sirius is mad about practically every good-looking girl that walks by."

Snape could believe that. "I don't think about it one way or the other. I'm only mocking them horribly."

Lily huffed a laugh against his chest. No; he didn't really think Black and Lupin had ever been anything like lovers. Such a thing would be about as likely as Lily turning away from Potter for good and turning to Severus instead. There was no chance of it, not if Severus lived a thousand repeating lifetimes. Her heightened desperation now was only a combination of worry for Severus—for herself, ill as she was—for the disturbed present of being in this place, with these people they'd watched (separately) grow up and die.

The curtain made a papery, rustling sound as Pomfrey returned. Severus staunchly resisted the urge to scramble away from Lily like a guilty and embarrassed seventeen-year-old.

"Mr. Snape," Madam Pomfrey said, actually putting her hands on her hips, "that is _not_ where you ought to be sitting."

"I want him here."

Severus blinked and looked down at the crown of Lily's head. It wasn't her words but the tone of her voice: hard and uncompromising, totally unlike her. She had certainly never talked to Madam Pomfrey like that.

Pomfrey looked surprised, but she was used to dealing with worse than an angry tone. "You need to rest, Miss Evans."

"I _am_ resting. I'll rest much better with Sev here." Was that a warning note in her voice?

Bewildered, Severus looked up to find Madam Pomfrey looking the same. He tried surreptitiously to see Lily's face, but then gave up on subtlety and bent down. Her eyes were trained on Madam Pomfrey, as hard as her voice and watchful, even wary.

"I'm not going anywhere," Severus said to her. He hadn't intended to say it, but it slipped out. When Lily turned her gaze to his, he felt the swell of her emotions ebbing into his thoughts: hardness, determination, desperation, fear, need—the cold. He let his Occlumency billow up gently, enough to allow himself to pull away from the edge of her mind.

 _The curse._ He felt cold, too, but whether it was from his own fear or the memory of hers, he didn't know. They might as well be the same, anyway.

"Mr. Snape may stay until curfew, Miss Evans," Madam Pomfrey said. Lily's eyes flashed with some emotion, too quickly for Severus to make it out from his distance in the dark ocean of Occlumency.

"You'll be asleep when I'm gone," he said. "It won't matter whether I'm here or not."

Her hand found his and gripped so tightly he thought she might leave a bruise. Not like her at all.

"I don't want you to leave me," she said, still in that hard voice, but he could hear the thread of discomfort, almost panic, that fissured through.

He wrapped his fingers around her wrist. "It is not a question of leaving you."

"Rest, Miss Evans," Pomfrey said. As she tucked her wand into her apron pocket, the soft cloud of spells she had woven circumspectly above Lily dissipated into the air tinted green by the lamps shining through the curtain. "I won't bother you until it's time for you to sleep."

She rustled out, disappearing into the silence beyond the muffling charm. Severus remained on Lily's bed, not moving when her head returned to his chest and her shallow breath drifted across his robes. He was thinking.

If the curse had an emotional effect, that would narrow its identification to a single category. A deep and intricate category, but Severus didn't balk at that; knowing what to rule out, he could begin investigating immediately.

He'd intended to go back to the dorms and weather whatever puerile nastiness his first group of enemies would have brewed up for tonight, but now he adjusted his plans to include a detour to the library. He needed to work as swiftly as possible. The only good thing was that it was highly unlikely the curse had been sealed with blood . . . if no blood were involved, the spell would be capable of being reversed.

He tried to loosen his grip on her, to make it less cruel; but Lily only pressed closer to him.

They did not speak. Some point after she seemed to doze off against him, he tried to roll her into a more comfortable position off his bony chest onto her pillow, but she only tightened her hold on him and muttered, _No_. So he left her where she was, the metal rod of the headstand digging into his back, cold through the coarse fabric of his robes. The side of him she pressed up against felt feverishly warm.

When Madam Pomfrey turned up with a beaker, Severus coaxed a somnolent Lily into drinking its contents down. Within exactly a minute she was asleep, breathing deep and even. He and Madam Pomfrey maneuvered her to lie flat on the mattress, where she lay like the insipid heroine in a fairy tale, deep in an enchanted sleep. They stood on opposite sides of the bed, looking down at her taut face in the soft silence woven through the hospital ward.

"You did right to bring her, Mr. Snape," Madam Pomfrey said quietly. "This is the work of a serious curse."

"Have you notified the Headmaster?" Severus asked, careful to keep his voice tucked within the shroud of his Occlumency.

"Yes. He should be here shortly, now the feast is done."

Then Severus ought to leave. "I'll be going, then," he said. He hesitated, thinking of thanking her, but in the end decided he'd probably drawn enough attention to himself for the evening. So he simply lifted the edge of the curtain and slipped into the more open silence of the vaulted ward, his head full of Lily's translucently pale face, stark against the tangle of her dark red hair.

He was within arm's reach of the door when the curtain at the bed next to it crumpled to the side and Black stepped out. Severus' first thought was how much bigger than himself Black was at this age; his second for the hardness of the emotion on the hateful, handsome face. Severus recognized that emotion, oh he did.

Severus went still, a reaction from years of expecting attacks. He felt the bare pressure of his wand was in sleeve, its slight weight that pressed against his wrist. Black wouldn't know that Severus had perfected a way to slide it into his palm with a twist and flick of his wrist; Black wouldn't see it coming . . . whatever Severus wanted to do to him . . . with even the middling force of his Dark Arts power, Severus could shatter through Black's shields, cut his beautiful face to ribbons, fill his dark gray eyes with blood—

The infirmary doors groaned inward, and Dumbledore appeared in the widening gap between the wooden halves. His robes were a deep, magnificent crimson embroidered with knots of silver that looked like spell-shot, so that he seemed to sparkle faintly as the lamp light moved across him. He'd seen Severus and Sirius perhaps even before they turned their heads to face them, but his light blue eyes were only calm and curious.

Severus ripped his Occlumency into place so hard he felt a pulse of pain. His wand had slid into his palm, grown clammy and damp. His heart was thundering like a horse.

"Good evening, gentlemen," the Headmaster said, as if they weren't mortal enemies with their wands out and every line of their bodies thrumming with hatred. "I was sorry to hear your friends have fallen ill enough to keep you from attending the feast tonight. But, ah . . . "

He drew toward them, smiling slightly now. But his eyes did not twinkle over the crescents of his glasses; they remained probing and serious. "Not even our festivities at their most excellent can compare to the delight of such affection."

God, those speeches—Severus had remembered them, but he'd forgotten exactly what they were like; he'd forgotten exactly how much Dumbledore always _meant_ them. Severus wanted to break all the windows in the hospital wing, but if he let any emotion beyond the merciless grip of his Occlumency, he was afraid he would shatter.

Dumbledore had drawn between Severus and the dog. "To bed with you now," he said, looking from one student to the other with his slight smile. "Weeping may tarry for the night, you know, but joy comes in the morning."

"Goodnight, sir," Black said curtly, giving Severus one last hard look, much harder than Lily would ever accomplish. Severus only stared back at him, beyond the cool, deep embrace of Occlumency, where even his hatred had been compacted. But still there; it was always there . . .

Then Black left them, striding out of the wing, the echo of his steps ringing faintly in the corridor beyond.

Severus did not dare look at Dumbledore. He moved toward the door, aware that he was hunching, praying hard, but whether it was to get out before Dumbledore spoke or to hear something kind, he didn't know; he didn't know—

He made it to the door before Dumbledore's voice arrested him. "Mr. Snape?" he said, and Severus was so very glad it was not 'Severus' he had to endure, not at first, not yet, not when this was first time he was hearing his voice since _Severus, please_ had ripped off a piece of his heart.

He turned, saying nothing, only watching Dumbledore from the side, as an owl would do, and not meeting his eyes. He could feel Dumbledore looking back, but not with the full weight of his gaze, only with that same serious curiosity as before.

"Yes, Headmaster?" Severus asked when Dumbledore said nothing. Did something shift beneath the light surface of Dumbledore's own Occlumency?

"I only wished to welcome you back to school," Dumbledore said. Severus' instincts told him this was not what Dumbledore had at first intended to tell him, but he didn't know what that could be. "It is the first year we did not have your company over the holidays."

If Severus could walk into that Hogwarts in his mind, the one where he was fully grown and everyone knew who he was, what he'd done, and forgave him, as Lily had done, Severus hoped he would hear, _Welcome back, my boy. Welcome home._

All Severus could manage in this Hogwarts was, "Right."

"I thought perhaps you'd gone to find something you had lost," Dumbledore said. "I hope you've found it now. Good night, Mr. Snape. May you have a peaceful night."

Unable to speak, Severus fled.

* * *

 

The halls were still lit by torchlight, but only every other two, so that the flames knifed up the stone walls. Severus walked through deep spells of shadow and lighter waves of firelight, his wand held low against his hip, his senses alight, hoping that outwardly he looked as if he were brooding unalertly. He did not think a strong attack would come first; the older ones would want to wait and see how he dealt with the smaller students before making their mark . . .

A hand flashed out from behind a black tapestry shifting with vines, seizing him by the arm and hauling him behind the cloth, plunging him into the darkness behind it. He reacted with as much thought and time it took to blink, firing off a spell that blasted the stones iwith an explosion of light, sound and a rain of rock dust, diving forward to trap his assailant to the wall by his throat.

"Merlin's hairy arsehole, Snape!" a strangled voice choked.

Severus snapped his wand alight, filling the narrow space with blue-white light. It carved out of the darkness the half-terrified, half-angry features of a fifteen-year-old Regulus Black.

"Black Minor," Severus said without thinking.

Regulus had Severus' hand at his throat, pinning him against the wall like a claw, but he stiffened at that old nickname. "I am the _only_ Black now," he snarled—or tried to, but Severus' grip was cutting off his air supply and it came out as a wheezing squeak. "Snape, let me up!"

Severus felt a sneer curling over his face. Regulus seemed to shrink for a moment, but then he pushed at Severus' arm and Severus did let up, stepping back. But he didn't put his wand away. Instead, he flicked a net of privacy spells around them, raising a brief starlight glow that trickled up from the ground to the ceiling and then faded into dusty sparkles, and finally to nothing.

"If you're getting your revenge in early, Black," Severus said, "I think you've officially flunked."

"You're such an ingrate," Regulus said in a small voice, although perhaps that was from the strangulation. "I came to _warn_ you, of all things."

Severus barely kept himself from snorting. " _Warn_ me? Of all things that's what I _won't_ believe."

"Snape, you stood up— _him_!" Regulus was probably trying to sound impressive, but his eyes in the wand-light were round and very young. But perhaps that was the influence of years Severus was no longer supposed to possess. "D'you know what— _everyone_ —is planning? Lucius Malfoy—"

"What, did he send key invitations around?"

"He didn't have to, he's related to half the people in the House, they meet up over hols. Everyone knew the minute you failed to show! Lucius was so angry . . . "

Perhaps Regulus' tiny voice and huge eyes weren't merely Severus' doing. And here he thought he'd managed to look fearsome. What a laugh—he was pretty sure everyone held him in wary contempt at this age.

"Beat the house elves in my stead, did he?" Severus asked.

Regulus shuddered. "Merciful Salazar, don't remind me. The whole House is against you now, Severus, how could you?"

Severus registered—with considerable surprise—the use of his personal name, but he made no comment on it. It was probably only a Tactic. "If you're here for a helping of confidences, you're further off your mark than you've dreamed. Stick to revenge, Black, and leave the heart-to-hearts to Hufflepuffs."

"I'm not here for revenge," Regulus said hotly, and then added, "But I'll have to be later, you understand, right?"

"Don't foreshadow your own ambitions, you twat," Severus said in disgust. "What kind of Slytherin are you?"

"What kind are you?" Regulus retorted. "Getting yourself hexed by a Gryffindor and standing up the Dark Lord, that's one thing—"

"Actually, it's two," Severus said.

"—but then _carrying_ the Mudblood to the hospit—urk!"

Severus enjoyed the way his wand dug into the soft flesh of Regulus' throat, how his eyes went round again, the expression of comprehending fear that stole onto his face like a shadow in the wand-light. Now Regulus was afraid, and it was all him, all Severus' doing . . .

"Do not," he whispered, now enjoying the cruelty in his voice as it curled in the narrow space between them, "use that word around me."

Regulus did not nod or swallow or say anything. He didn't seem to dare. Without stepping back, Severus tipped his wand away from Regulus' throat, freeing him. Regulus' hand crept up his neck, trembling. The point of Severus' wand had punctured the skin, leaving a small dark blotch on the pale expanse of his throat before Regulus' hand covered it.

Suddenly this wasn't enjoyable anymore. Severus may look sixteen, but he was fully thirty-eight, and Regulus Black was nothing more than a wide-eyed boy. As his own mother had pointed out, most children simply spouted whatever they heard in their parents' drawing-rooms day in, day out; and in pure-blood families like Regulus's, he heard 'blood-traitor' and 'Mudblood' the way Lily heard 'communist' and 'Labour Party.' Had Regulus ever given a serious thought to any of it? Severus doubted it, the way he doubted that he and Sirius Black would ever stop loathing each other to the ends of the earth.

Regulus was just a child. Which made Severus an utter shit.

"Just don't say it," Severus said at last. "I hate that stupid fucking word."

"Right," Regulus whispered. The soft rustle of his voice was nothing like Severus' had been; it was not cruel, only frightened. "Merlin and Salazar, Severus, what happened to you over hols? You didn't—did you _defect_ or something?"

"I think it would be better for everyone, Black, if you neither thought about that nor even let anyone suspect that you had. The point everyone will hinge on is my worthless abandonment, not what it signifies, if it even signifies anything at all."

Then he turned, deliberately showing Regulus his back—a mark that could communicate either deepest contempt or sincerest trust in Slytherin—and walked out of the hidden corridor, his body dissolving the invisible net of privacy spells as he passed through them, as one destroyed a spider's livelihood.

"Severus!" Regulus' hiss slowed his steps, but he did not turn all the way. "The password's _mania_."

He listened to Regulus' feet patter down the other end of the hidden corridor and disappear into the silence of a castle preparing to sleep.

Then Severus resumed walking, through the halls as more torches guttered down, headed to the Restricted stacks of the library.

* * *

 

Severus knew the castle so well he could walk it in complete darkness. He did not even hear Filch, who moved with considerably more spryness at this age and kept two cats named Counter and Clockwise. Severus used to feed them catnip-laced treats outside of Filch's office, before shutting them inside so they would wreck his records. If Severus had found a student doing such a thing to him, he'd have strung them from hooks by their nostrils.

It was hours past midnight, and he had two books concealed in his robes that the library would miss eventually, but not know where to find. Books secure, unlit wand still in his hand, he wound his way beneath the ground, moving toward the dungeons by memory. His memories of the damp that seeped through the walls and the earth were older than he thought they would be, as was the smell of moisture's tinge on the stones. He hadn't dared to prowl as much as Headmaster. It would have made him look too restless.

But here was that scent again, of damp earth and stones, and it was dear to him; as dear as the traces of gardenias and oranges and Muggle fabric softener that had always clung to Lily when he saw her during hols. And Dumbledore . . . the Headmaster had smelled of cinnamon, the smoky depth of tea leaves, and brown sugar. The blinding sparkle of his robes was as familiar as the sight of Lily's flared corduroys and green sweater whose cuff she'd picked loose of a thread that she liked to wind around her finger, turning the tip white.

Severus shook these reminiscences into the back of his mind. He needed to remain alert, however unlikely an attack would be at this hour.

The darkness down beneath the earth seemed as deep as ocean waters. He heard nothing, but that meant nothing. He sank into the place of instinct, just beneath the surface of his Occlumency, extending his senses out from himself.

But he reached out for the entrance to the common room untroubled and murmured, "Mania," partly surprised when the stones scraped open as they should. A brief spell ascertained that someone pathetic had laid a tripping jinx across the threshold. Severus dismantled it with a flick, and with another sent a spell forth that would tell him if anything living occupied the common room. When the feedback was only a cat and a couple of scrabbling mice, he stepped through the doorway.

He felt distinctly odd. Not from a spell; from walking into the Slytherin common room for the first time in—he couldn't even remember. He had occasionally had to go there for something his hideous students desperately needed, but only very occasionally.

He set a jinx on the door to knock whoever left the room first in the morning on their arse and sprout their face with pus-filled boils. Juvenile and disgusting—disgusting in its junvenility, too—but it was the sort of thing they'd expect from him. No, actually he believed they would expect a lot worse, but he wasn't going to hex a bunch of stupid brats with Dark magic, even if he couldn't simply do nothing. He hoped the door-jinx would be triggered by one of his would-be overeager attackers, not some hapless first-year girl, but there was no way to make a spell gender-specific.

The vaulted cavern of the common room was as dark as it was empty, thinly lit by the banked fire in the hearth. Severus moved around the hulking shadows of the furniture, sending another wave of sentry spells into the network of boys' dormitories, and a second into the girls' for good measure. The majority of the _pings_ reflected back to him were sleeping markers, but there was one knot awake in the boys' dorms: about four boys, and they were moving down the branch that led to the sixth-years' wing . . .

Severus made his careful, silent way toward them, down the pillared halls whose chambers were only distinguished in the sightless dark by the quiet breezes that drifted through the dungeons. Everyone was asleep but that clump of boys, and as he drew up to the corner where the sixth-year dorm intersected the main corridor, he heard them whispering . . .

" . . . do it now, while he's sleeping, he won't be expecting it this late . . . "

"Yeah, but what if he's awake?"

"He won't be, Barty, it's the middle of the night! He'll be asleep, mark my words . . . "

Barty Crouch, Junior—so these must be fourth or fifth-year boys; Severus couldn't remember how much younger than himself Barty Crouch had been. He did not want to be so pathetic that he was relieved to not hear Regulus' voice with them, but Regulus would not assign himself to vengeance in a crowd. He was a Black; they had their pride.

Severus heard the door to his dorm scrape open, the soft shuffling sounds of the boys stealing through. And then—

 _BANG._ Someone had warded the door; two of the boys went flying into the hall to the sound of yells and sizzles; the other two hurtled forward into the room and out of sight. From the yelping, shouting, swearing, and muffled explosions of magic that flickered starkly to life on the walls, Severus' dorm-mates had either set traps or were especially quick on the draw.

Severus walked calmly down the hall, which was now lit by lamps thrown on in the dorm room, and stopped above the two groaning lumps in the hall. When they looked up at him, their expressions of terror and consternation made him almost say _Twenty-five points from Slytherin_ , but he caught himself. One of them had the straw hair and milk-white round face of Barty Crouch.

"Bad luck, tossers," Severus said, and silently flicked a spell that would turn their genitals into turnips. It wasn't painful, only unpleasant, and as they shrieked with shock he stepped over them into his now-battered dorm room.

A haze of smoke hung over everything, and the other two fourth-years were lying in a heap on the floor, apparently unconscious, their features obscured by a combination of leeks, scabs, boils, and little fluttering tentacles. They were lucky nothing worse had got them; although perhaps it had, and the effects were simply more subtle.

Haddock had got tangled in his sheets and was trying to free his head. The hangings around Mulciber's bed were sputtering with flames he was attempting to put out; but when he snarled, " _Aguamenti_!" he produced a jet of rum that only set the fire roaring. Avery picked up a jug of water and hurled its contents at the burning curtains, hitting about one-quarter of the fire and three-quarters of Mulciber.

"What an idyllic scene," Severus said; Avery, Mulciber, and Rosier all whirled to face him; Haddock struggled harder to get the blankets off his head. "Are you wizards, or baboons with sticks?"

He pointed at the fire and a fountain of icy water exploded from the tip, drenching Mulciber and the nearby Avery, soaking Mulciber's scorched hangings and his bedding beneath it. Both boys sputtered as the water died away, the now-thin jet trickling back into Snape's wand like a hose shut off.

Then he swept the unconscious fourth-year boys tumbling into the air and, turning, made to toss them out into the hall—which was when he saw the crowd back there, all sleep-muddled boys, the younger ones all gaping, the older ones watching. The back of Severus' neck prickled; someone _could_ have got him while he was turned away. He'd been lucky they only decided to watch.

He chucked the unconscious boys at them. Another turn of his wrist and the door swung shut, hitting its frame with a muffled _boom_.

For a moment he waited, his back still to the boys in his year, three of whom would become some of the Dark Lord's closest Death Eaters. He had not formulated a plan on how to deal with these boys, other than to take things as they came. There were times when that most Gryffindor of plans was the only thing you could do.

But they would be interpreting the sight of his back as it faced them. Whatever Regulus had read into it, Severus had been showing him trust.

Not this time.

He turned, Occlumency tight around his mind, his wand held low in a defensive position that could turn to attack in a moment. Avery and Mulciber were still dripping, standing where they'd been; Haddock had freed himself but was still sitting on the floor, his mouth hanging open. Rosier had not moved, either, but three wands were out, every face watched him, and Rosier's wand was held slightly up and forward . . . an attack position that could fire almost without notice.

Professor Snape would be able to tell when the attack was coming, but Severus had not yet been able to decide how capable to appear.

"You've got a lot of nerve coming in here at all, Snape," Rosier said in a quiet voice. It was almost thoughtful, yet almost a threat.

"I've got a lot of nerve in general," Severus replied. Then he wanted to smack himself. _Oh Christ, what a Gryffindor's remark._

Rosier smiled at that, but it was thin, soft with unpleasant thoughts behind it. "I'll say you do. Do you know what Lucius Malfoy is offering the person who takes you down?"

"A stock of Muggle gangster movies? Riches of the Orient? He doesn't have a sister, so it can't be—"

"Merlin's prick, Snape," Avery said, staring, "what in the hells's the matter with you?"

"He's gone mad," Mulciber said softly, in an echo of that voice he used to whisper to girls between the stacks of the library.

 _Madder than you know_ , Severus thought. _And I'm not remotely afraid of any of you pricks._

And he really was not. He was wary of what they might do, not what they could do. They couldn't touch him on even ground, and even though Slytherins rarely fought _even_ odds, the long odds weren't worrying him either. It was . . . a relief to understand that. For all his assurances to his mother and Lily, all his careful logic, he realized he hadn't been able to quell his lingering doubts. With Occlumency, yes, but not in any real way.

No, the only fear Severus had was for Lily. That was the only place they could hurt him. And they would have to step over his headless, eviscerated corpse to get to her.

"What I am right now," he said, "is going to bed."

And with one wide arc he sent four glaring, crimson Stupefies across the room, knocking them all into oblivion.

His birthday present to himself.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On a technical note, I know that the Marauder's Map sometimes shows passwords, but I'm theorizing this trick is for objects with static passwords, like the One-Eyed Witch, and that James et al filled those passwords in themselves, rather than the map just "showing" it. Since the Headmaster's Office changes passwords constantly, they wouldn't be able to keep up or know future PWs.

_January 9, 1977_

When Lily woke up feeling worse than ever, she realized she'd been expecting to feel better. Her skin and her blood felt like ice, her insides hollowed out. She forced her eyes open, and they ached and burned; her throat pulsed with rawness when she swallowed, and she was alone—

Severus _was not there_.

Did this cause her physical pain? She thought it might—in the center of her chest, as if while she slept, her desperation had gone to live in her heart. She struggled to push herself up, and a hundred needles stabbed into her temples, her eyes, the back of her head—

The doors to the hospital wing swung inward and Severus walked through them, thank _God_. She wanted to weep at the sight of him. She fought against her blankets, reaching for him, wishing she could obliterate distance instead of Apparating.

"What's the matter?" Severus said, and he was at her bedside in a moment, as if he did know how to erase distance. He caught both the hands she was holding out to him. "Jesus Christ," he said, staring into her face, "I'll call Pomfrey—"

"No," she tried to say, but all she could do was shake her head; her lips moved but nothing came out. _No._ She pulled him toward her, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and her lips found his jaw as he braced convulsively against the bed to stop from falling onto her. His hair was greasier today, his skin glossed with a sheen of oil, but she didn't care. He smelled of something singed, and the dust of old paper, and musty sheets, and as she breathed it in and found the pulse of his throat with her lips, she felt a warmth sparkling through her, wafting up from that cold, hollow place inside her, filling her veins from fingertips to toes. She no longer hurt as much; she was feeling better by the second . . . not only better but lighter, sweeter.

Severus' hands seized her shoulders like claws. The warmth swooped, intensifying, burning, but _good_ —and then he pushed her back almost roughly until he could look into her face. The warmth ebbed, as if she were falling into a shadow, but she didn't feel the chill yet, because his eyes were roving over her face, and she could see him, she could still touch him—and she did, her hands anchored to his shoulders, anchoring herself.

"Lily." He seemed to hesitate. One of his hands lifted from her shoulder—and there, she felt the chill then, she _hated_ it—but he only lifted it to brush the backs of his knuckles across her cheek. She tilted forward, trying to deepen the touch, her eyes sifting closed, and felt his fingertips slipping her hair out of her face with the most delicate movements, as if he were handling something so fragile it could break from the barest pressure. She felt him tucking it behind her ear, still with those tiny, delicate movements.

"Lily," he said. His voice was that low, liquid pulse that belonged entirely to grown-up Sev, and it pulsed through her with every shifting syllable; but there was a tremor under it, the same tremor that rustled strands of her hair as he smoothed it away from her face. "You are unwell. But I _am_ going to—solve it."

"You're already solving it." Her lips felt clumsy, her throat still raw. "Just don't stop touching me."

His hand stilled in her hair. She felt his fingers skating from the crown of her hair to the tips. "I think I may know what you've been cursed with," he said. Still liquid and beautiful, that voice, but definitely shaking now, as if from a disturbance deep beneath the surface.

Lily opened her eyes. His face looked incongruous—young, open, somehow painfully vulnerable; but with a raw hardness at the edges, as though he were trying to control himself in some way.

"I've been cursed?" she said, blinking her swollen, gritty eyes.

"Yes." His hand paused, tangled in the ends of her hair. It flitted up to her shoulder, pressing warmth. "You didn't know? Did Pomfrey not tell you?"

"You didn't either," she said, although she didn't blame him; she couldn't. "It's not important, though—I mean, what curse is it?"

He opened his mouth, but he didn't get a chance to tell her, because with a bang James, Sirius and— _him_ burst in through the doors. At the sight of him, Lily's fingers curled into Sev's collar like claws.

Remus flew bolt upright in his hospital bed, his eyes half-mast, his hair sticking up everywhere. "What the sodding hell," he said blearily, his gaze groping toward the door. "Oh, God, it's too early for you lot."

"Moony!" cried Sirius and James, orbiting around his bed, while— _Peter_ hung on the foot of the bed and beamed.

"You look so charming, first thing in the morn," James said.

"Fresh from your beauty sleep," Sirius added. "It's done a number on your hair, by the way." He went to smooth that down, but only messed it up more. Remus thwacked him with a pillow and fell backwards at the same time, pulling the pillow over his face.

"How are you feeling?" Peter asked, perching on the metal frame at the foot.

"Like killing these two numbskulls. _Other_ people were probably sleeping before you came in, Padfoot, Prongs!"

A funny thing happened to James: he straightened up from where he'd been stooping over Remus on the bed as if he'd been electrified. His spine uncurved, his head came up, and in one movement he swiveled around, his wide eyes roving across the empty beds, looking for—

"Evans!" He vaulted off Remus' bed, scurrying up the ward toward her.

Lily felt Severus' hand tighten on her shoulder so hard, she reckoned she'd have a bruise tomorrow. She didn't care. She wanted him to put a matching one on the other shoulder.

Then James noticed it was Severus folded on the bed beside her, and he stopped as if he'd run into a wall. His eyes narrowed so fast it was almost funny, darting from her to Sev and back again.

Behind him, Sirius had stretched out to recline on Remus' bed like a king, propped up on his elbow, his dark hair falling into his eyes as he watched her and Sev and James across the ward. Next to him, still flat on his back, Remus kept his pillow over his face, his arms clamped around it. He wasn't moving at all. And Peter had swiveled around, still perched on the foot of the bed, now watching sharply, sharply . . .

Lily gripped Severus' hand on her shoulder. _Steady me_ , she thought.

Unspoken, his fingers threaded through hers. His touch felt like the sunlight you couldn't find in winter.

"Evans . . . " James moved closer to her, but slowly. His skin was pale, and his eyes behind his glasses were large and filled with something more than simple anxiety. She remembered Sev's face when she had reached for him. What did she look like?

"Merlin and Godric, Evans," James said, now at the foot of her bed, "what's happened to you?"

 _A curse, Sev says_. But she didn't want to tell James. She didn't know why; she just didn't.

"It's nothing Pomfrey can't sort out," she said. "Hols were a little . . . a lot." She found herself looking at Sev, at his face turned to a point halfway between her and James; at the emotion narrowing his strong, slanting eyebrows, his great nose, his thin lips. She wanted to trace the curve of his lips with her fingertips.

"Evans, you look like you're dying," James said.

When Severus made a convulsive movement, James' wand was suddenly in his hand, pointing at Sev— panic was seizing her heart, crushing it—

"What've you done to her, you sick bastard?" James yelled. She heard Remus' bed squeak violently; Sirius must have jumped up; but she could only look at the wand, think of spells exploding out of it that would hurt Severus, and she couldn't allow it, she could never allow it again—

"Don't you _dare_!" she shouted back. She jabbed her elbow into Severus' arm, trying to force him behind her, knowing that James wouldn't hex her even if she was between him and the boy he hated so much for _no reason_.

Severus' wand was out, but it was dipping, perhaps with shock of her shoving at him to squirm behind her on the bed. She felt herself swaying with the effort and had to brace against the mattress to keep from falling; Severus grabbed her, his wand tilting in his fingers; she was shaking but she held herself up, refusing to fall, to give James or Sirius or Petter the target they needed— She searched the ward for them, her eyes narrowed to slits.

James' wand was still pointing at Sev—at her and Sev, now. Behind him, Sirius had his wand out, but he'd stopped halfway up the ward, watching her and Sev so closely, so hard. Peter hovered at the back, his face even sharper; Remus had scrambled out of bed and was on his feet, but he hadn't a wand, he was in his pajamas still, his hair in disarray but his face wary and awake.

"Don't you dare," Lily whispered, to all of them. "If you lay a finger on him, a single spell—I'll make you so sorry—"

She was shaking all over, with effort, with adrenaline and fatigue— She felt Severus' hands on her, tipping her back against his chest. She rolled her gaze upward, toward his face, and found it hovering over her, inverted, as he laid her head to rest on his shoulder. He put his palm on her forehead; it was cool and dry. She wanted to memorize every line of his face, but at his touch a lassitude flooded her, and she closed her eyes, feeling exhausted, so tired.

"It will be all right," he murmured, stroking the hair back from her forehead. "It won't last much longer."

"You promise?" she murmured. The cracks on her lips rubbed together when she spoke, stinging.

"Absolutely."

"Tell them I'm serious." She pressed her cheek into his chest, curled her hand over the beat of his heart. "They can't hurt you . . . "

"I'll make sure they get the message."

She felt his hand in her hair, as soft as a ghost, and then she slipped away again, into the darkness and the warmth.

But deep beneath, like a hole in the earth, she felt a coldness waiting.

"What have you done to her?" Prongs said, and Sirius knew they were on the edge of a big brewing fuck-up. Prongs almost _never_ cussed like a Muggle. He had to be really, really, really upset before he'd even let out a 'shit.'

If Snivellus had been anybody else, Sirius would've given him credit for the way he laid Evans down and stood up, not hiding behind her. He could have kept her slung over his lap and Prongs wouldn't have dared go for him, for fear of hurting her.

"I have done nothing," Snape said, with an icy sneer. He looked at Prongs the way Sirius would look at a cockroach, or Kreacher. "In fact, Potter, I believe _you're_ the stupid shit who got her so worked up she passed out."

"Watch your filthy mouth, Snivellus," Sirius said softly.

Snape's gaze flashed at him, tangible with hatred. Sirius felt it in a shiver through his blood, like an electrical pulse.

Sometimes he thought he was addicted to fighting Snape. Seeing that look and getting his wand in his hand for this gave him the same feeling as lighting a fag between his lips. Because Snape was the genuine article: a nasty, evil, twisted bastard, and if he got the chance he would hurt you in ways you wouldn't ever come back from. Oh, you'd be alive, but you wouldn't be the same.

Because that's what Dark magic did, the kind all the Death Eaters wanted to learn. Of course, it was almost impossible to get that good without killing yourself or going mad out of your head. No sixth year kid was going to get there, no matter how nasty he was, how much he wanted it.

Sirius knew that. But something about the way Snape was looking at him made him think . . .

His blood felt scalding in his fingertips.

"Well, Potter?" Snape asked, but he was still looking at Sirius. "Are you man enough to hex me over the unconscious body of your dear Evans? She's not in any position to throw herself between us. Unless I use her as a human shield," he said, his tone now brutally offhand, and he did look at Prongs then, his eyes glinting with a cruelty that he'd never had before, even when Sirius had seen him playing with mice like a cat.

"Do you think you could take the risk, Potter?" Snape asked, his voice a whisper of malice, something soft and brutal. "Will you fire at me, if the cost may be your beloved girl? All I have to do . . . " His mouth curved into a smile. " . . . is be _faster_."

Sirius couldn't see Prongs' face, but he wondered if it was like his own. Snape's wand was low, held negligently in his left hand, pointing almost casually toward Evans unconscious on the bed, where she lay looking like a corpse already, all stark white skin and cracked lips.

Sirius tightened his grip on his wand.

He felt a tingle of magic across the back of his hand and blinked. Then Remus raised his voice and shouted, "Madam Pomfrey! Lily's fainted!"

Sirius turned to him, incredulous. Madam Pomfrey's office banged open and she almost tumbled out, her apron untied and her wand in her hand. When she saw the three boys with their wands out, she went poker-stiff and jabbed at them.

"Out!" she said, outraged. "Wands _away_ and all of you _out_! This is a place of rest and wellness, and if a _single one of you_ winds up back here today, I will pitch you out in the snow without so much as a sticking plaster! It is _ridiculous_! All of you!"

Wormtail squeaked and scurried out, banging the doors behind him. Prongs tried to argue with Pomfrey, but she was having none of it. From what Sirius could hear of the lecture she was giving in a low, furious voice, she was laying into him full and hard.

Perhaps Snape was getting out while the getting was good, because he didn't argue. He left Evans' bedside without a backwards glance, almost gliding up the space between the beds. His eyes were trained on Sirius, dark and unfathomable and cruel with loathing.

"Until next time," Snape whispered as he passed.

"Count on it," Sirius hissed through his teeth.

Once he'd gone, Sirius turned to Moony. He looked pale, his hair still tufty, his arms bare in a thin Muggle t-shirt, no goosebumps even though the ward was chilly. Werewolf body heat and all.

"You canceled whatever silencing spell Snape'd put on the door," Sirius said. He didn't know what he felt about this. Maybe a little impressed: Moony had done it non-verbally, across the entire length of the ward.

Moony looked him in the eye, but there was something distant about his gaze. "You should go before she turns her wrath on you," he said.

"Right," said Sirius. He stuffed his wand in his pocket. "I'll wait for you outside," he said, and turned to go, almost knocking into Prongs, whose face was stark white under his burning cheeks.

Sirius' hand tingled with the almost feverish heat Remus always gave off. He followed Prongs out into the hall, swinging the doors shut behind him.

The corridor outside was empty. Wormtail was either lurking around the corner or he'd really done a runner. Probably the latter.

Snape was gone, too.

"That—" Prongs couldn't speak. "That—"

"I know, mate," Sirius said. He didn't try to touch Prongs; he'd only get hexed or punched in this state. He knew, even though he didn't think he'd ever seen Prongs this worked up. His hands were shaking and his eyes were almost glassy. Maybe it was rage, or maybe it was fear.

Sirius tried to remember if he'd ever seriously thought Snape could be that much of a— _whatever_ he was—and didn't think so. That had been . . . something _else_.

Prongs' breath fell heavy into the silence of the hall. "You didn't believe me before." Breath. Breath. "But now you do."

"Now I do," Sirius said. It wasn't that he hadn't believed before; it was more that he hadn't cared. But he wasn't going to tell James; he wasn't a fuckwit.

"Padfoot." Mother of sin, where those tears in James' eyes? Oh Merlin. "What if he kills her?"

Part of Sirius wanted to find that evil, manic shit and take him apart tendon by tendon. Some nights he couldn't sleep for the thought of evil walking the halls of Hogwarts. He'd known Snape was going to be part of it eventually, was going to bring it everywhere he walked.

He just hadn't known it was going to be this soon.

"We'll go to Dumbledore," he said to Prongs, finally touching him on the shoulder. "He'll know what to do."

_I hope._

Severus had expected to feel some uplifting sense of pleasure after having taunted Potter so perfectly. The expression on his face had been inspiring.

That's what he'd thought at first, anyway.

Then he realized his pleasure had an almost . . . nostalgic tint. _If only I'd been able to see that expression before he died_ was the thought that flitted through his mind. He puzzled over it as he left the hospital wing, heading back toward the library.

Where triumph should have dwelt inside him, there was only an echo of emptiness. Why?

It occurred to him, as he slipped through the stacks for the tables far in the back which no one actually used for studying, that all the old dynamics no longer existed. Potter and Black thought he was a nasty Death Eater snake, and he wasn't. They thought he was the same person they'd always loathed, and he wasn't. And this Black and this Potter weren't the same men he'd last spent so much of his hatred on. The man that had suffered for twelve years in Azkaban and sunk into his own despair; the other who'd died at the hands of the Dark Lord, failing to protect his wife and son—they didn't exist yet. In a very real way, they were gone. And naturally Severus had wrapped his hatred around everything Black and Potter _had been_ when he'd known them. . . and here, right now, they weren't _those men_ any more than he was a Death Eater. It was those men he wanted to hurt the most, because they had hurt him the most. Hurting these boys seemed almost inconsequential in comparison.

He wouldn't have expected that. Hadn't he loathed them, for so long, for everything they'd done to him? That included the suckerpunches they'd perpetrated at school; their hypocritical bigotry; their undeserved popularity; the way they'd taken Lily away from him; the way she'd gone with them. Shouldn't he be leaping at the chance to avenge himself on them, in whatever form? He would have thought so. He still hated them, loathed them with all his capacity to loathe; so why did the memory of Potter's face just now only leave him with an emptiness?

He supposed this what they called perspective.

 _When Lily goes back to them,_ he told himself, _when things return to the way they were, then you will, too_.

It wasn't a comfort.

He set out on the stained library table the two books he'd filched last night. It was decent luck, having free period first thing; he'd forgotten, but a trip last night into Slughorn's office for a copy of his timetable had patched that hole in his memory.

His dorm-mates had destroyed all his possessions last night before he'd got to the room, so this morning he had availed himself of their supplies while they were bound, stupefied, to their beds. Mulciber had donated quills, Avery parchment and ink; Flitwick would lend him copies of his Charms' texts, and he knew all his Potions by heart. He was only glad he hadn't particularly cared for anything in his trunk, and always kept his money on his person. He could restock next Hogsmeade weekend. And who gave a fuck about supplies when the real problem was Lily? Everything in a trunk could be replaced.

He pulled out a piece of Avery's parchment and one of Mulciber's quills, to sketch out what he knew of the curse. _Causes emotional flux. Increased temper. Desperation. Fear. Unnatural reactions to the actions of others. Internal turmoil transmitting to physiological symptoms. Psychological symptoms alleviated by touch, but physiological remain unaltered. Sensations of cold without any outside influence._

Or perhaps the curse was draining the life from her.

Severus' saw his hand shaking as he reached for the smaller of the two texts: a book deceptively thin, its leaves made of parchment brittle and warped with age. It smelled of dust and decay, and when he touched it, he felt the cold tingles in his fingertips that signaled Dark magic. But it was a book you could permit to sit in a library of foolish school-children because only Dark wizards would feel any effects from it. It did not even contain any incantations, only a catalogue of Dark spells and their symptoms.

It listed no cures, either. But Severus could make do. Most Dark cures were the same . . . when you could use them at all.

He tipped the cover open—wood, two sheaves bound with twine—and flicked through the aged paper. Some of the writing was beginning to flake off, so he cast Illuminati, a spell that would light up any traces of ink it found. The golden-black swirls of light refracted the dust motes in the air.

He flipped to the section for Spells of the Heart.

Contrapasso would be listed here, were it official. These were spells that acted first upon the psyche, so powerfully the effects bled out into the body. They used your own emotions to poison you. To drive you mad. To kill you.

The glowing letters on the page seemed to slip through his attention, whispering taunts. There were curses that destroyed happiness and killed you from despair; that turned love to hatred or to terror, condemning the ones you loved to die at your hands; and some that turned your _capacity_ for love into brutal resentment, so you could never love again. There were curses to bind another person's heart to you, poisoning them from a dearth of your company, your touch, your love, because no amount of you would ever be enough to sate their need. And still there were others that found every happy memory of someone in your mind and turned them to ash, so that you remembered them always, but never that they had made you happy. The person you had loved meant nothing to you, in the end.

That last one passed through his mind like a shiver. Could that be what she was suffering. . . ? Her attitude toward Potter and the lot of animal-shaggers was too. . . incongruous as to what he'd thought of her. He _remembered_ seventh year, the way they'd all started going about together; how Potter had quit needing to hex anyone but Snivellus to get a laugh, because he'd had _her_ to make him laugh. . . Lily had seemed to take pleasure in their company; and he'd found that letter she'd written to Black, cast aside in Grimmauld Place. Black must have treasured the thing to have kept it stored somewhere, all those years. They should have all been friends, in which case her coldness, her panic for their hexing him, couldn't just be products of some ham-handed Gryffndor attempt to create an illusion of normalcy, or the product of altered circumstances.

But. . . no. He ran his finger over the final curse, the Memory Ash. He was getting carried away, twisting facts to suit the theory. That curse was much too involved to have been fired off in the street. . . it required the blood of the victim and an extensive knowledge of their psyche. It was a very powerful Dark spell. Lucius couldn't have cast it. Severus wasn't sure who could have.

What did the Dark spells require? That was important, as was their level. He didn't _know_ if Lucius had cursed her; he was only the most likely culprit.

He pulled the second book forward and leafed through it to _Spelles of the Harte_. If he recalled correctly, host of the Heart Spells required blood or skin, although the latter ingredient could be substituted with hair. So that meant that, whatever spell she was suffering, Lucius _couldn't_ have cursed her on the street. He'd have needed to find her, either at the hospital (and they hadn't been there long enough to perpetrate a ritual of this nature) or at her home; and the work it would have involved to locate and curse her at her house was something he couldn't believe of Lucius. A Mudblood would be beneath the honor of his exertion. If someone delivered her in a package on his doorstep, he'd probably have been happy to roll up his sleeves and set to, but he would leave any kind of revenge on her to others. Even his vengeance towards Severus would be conducted by proxy. To do otherwise would be stooping. And Lucius wouldn't be interested in spells like this. He'd never understood the subtlety of emotions. Lucius thought revenge wasn't proper unless it was overt and punctuated with begging. An organic slide into insanity, into death, would bore him. He wouldn't even see the point.

Severus rubbed at his forehead, where a dull ache was building. Very well, then; it couldn't have been Lucius. Too out of character, too advanced magically, too untenable logistically. . . but if not Lucius, then who? Heart Spells were _personal_. . . to do this, someone would need to hate Lily on an intimate level, to understand the importance of emotion. . .

He had seen Muggle cartoons depict a sudden revelation with a light bulb. He'd got the symbolism, even though he'd thought it was blatant and unsubtle; but he found that was exactly what he felt at that moment: as if a light bulb had been switched on his head, showering a darkened space with light.

A motive to hurt Lily like this, and the means, both magically and temporally, to do it.

His mother had even told him she thought Lily would break his heart. . .

He put his hand over his face and breathed. He just hoped his mother hadn't used blood. Still, he would perform the most powerful counter-spell he could, just in case; and in the meantime, he would brew Lily a neutralizer. It wouldn't even take too long to concoct; it was only a suppressant, not a cure for even the most minor symptom. Just enough to get her out of the hospital wing. He would need to pretend she was on the mend before he performed the counter-curse.

The pretense was probably pointless in the extreme, but to simply whisk her out of the infirmary in the dead of the night and then return her in the morning, fresh as a daisy, would be foolhardy. He was trying to _avoid_ foolhardy. That was the province of Gryffindor fuckwits.

He'd need a concealed place to invoke the counter-spell. . . and Potter out of the way. . . Black, too, and Pettigrew, if he could manage it. . . Lupin was the least likely to follow him, whether under his own steam or because his _pack_ asked him to. . . he might make the promise, but then he'd find a way to pretend he hadn't been able to follow through, thereby keeping everyone as pleased as possible. Keeping people pleased as possible was Lupin's guiding light.

When the clock chimed the hour, Severus welcomed it. Anything to get him out of that cold, silent cavern of the library, where the dust swirled in the air without any answers to comfort.

* * *

 

"I'm _not_ trying to be unhelpful, James, I just think you're... overreacting."

"Overreacting?" James' face was bright with splotches of emotion—fury, indignation, maybe even fear. "Overreacting? I thought you were there, Moony, I thought you heard Snape, saw what he's done to her—"

"What I mean," Remus said, trying to sound patient but afraid he was only sounding desperate, "is that Dumbledore surely knows already what you want to tell him. About Snape."

"He did come to the infirmary last night," Sirius added. For a split second of madness Remus thought Sirius was going to be helpful, actually helpful—but then the inevitable happened: "But Snape was behaving himself in front of him, wasn't he? I think we should go see Dumbledore. Give over the password, Moony, won't you, mate?"

And that was the only reason they'd bothered to let Remus in on their plan: as a Prefect, he knew the password to the Headmaster's office. For emergencies. He reminded them of this.

"This is an emergency!" James said, with a kind of hard, fierce urgency. "Moony, you're one of my best mates, don't make me hex you. Give over the password!"

Remus decided to try being firm. Maybe it would work this time. "N-no." Well, so much for that. Looking into James' bright-eyed, red-cheeked face, he could feel himself starting to fold like a wet sock—James was opening his mouth furiously—Sirius was sighing and rolling his eyes—

"I will _take_ you to the Headmaster's office," Remus said feebly. _Remus, this is you, letting you know that you suck._ "As in, I will go _with_ you. You don't want to make things worse, do you?" he asked, waving a threat that even _sounded_ vague, but James would only care that Remus wasn't standing between him and justice for Lily Evans.

"Great," James said, almost a gasp. "Thanks, Moony, you're one of the best. Now come _on_!" And he seized both Remus and Sirius by the necks of their robes and hauled them down the hall.

"Prongs," Remus protested, "I thought you meant _later_ —" (He hadn't, actually, but it didn't hurt to try.) "I have Ancient Runes to get to."

"Dumbledore'll give you a pass," James said with the arrogance of indifference.

Remus decided he'd rather get detention for skiving off than jinxed or scolded by McGonagall for giving out the Headmaster's password, so he just let himself be dragged.

"Ring dings," he said to the gargoyle when James shoved him in front of it.

" _Now_ you can go to Runes," Sirius said, like he thought he was funny.

"I've come this far," Remus muttered. He let Sirius shunt him onto the stairs after James, who was practically dancing with anticipation. His hair was as wild as if he'd been electrocuted.

"Crowd up a stair, James, would you?" Remus asked, because with all three of them crammed onto one step, Remus was feeling like the werewolf slice in a Gryffindor sandwich. Sirius was practically breathing down his neck.

"Sorry," James said distractedly. At the top, he vaulted off the stairs and pounded on the door. Remus had to grab his arm to keep him from bursting in without waiting for the signal; when none came and the seconds wrenched by, Remus thought James might hit him to get him to let go.

Then one of the doors opened. Dumbledore appeared, wearing robes in a magnificent shade of lilac, looking curiously down at Remus and James, and peering at tall Sirius eye-to-eye.

"To what do I owe the curious pleasure, gentlemen?" Dumbledore asked, but he let his study door fall open and stepped to the side to allow James to barrel inside.

"It's about Evans," James burst out, "Lily Evans, and Snape." When Remus jabbed his heel into James' foot, he squeaked, "Sir!" with watered eyes.

"Ah yes. That." Dumbledore waved his wand in an absent-minded way, and three matching chintz armchairs netted out of the air in front of his desk.

Remus seized James by his collar and forced him into a chair. Sirius sat like they were all about to take tea, his attention roving over Dumbledore's peculiar, flashing instruments and the dozing portraits on the walls as though he were only half paying attention to the conversation that had James so agitated, he might at any minute explode from the ears.

Dumbledore smiled faintly at them as he took his own seat. "I am not surprised," he said, his voice and manner suggesting they were discussing the outcome of a school project he'd been mildly pleased with. "Not at all surprised that such a . . . sensational departure from the norm has drawn your attention. Particularly as it concerns two people with whom you have always been . . . so concerned."

Remus felt his ears burning. He stared at a dish of sugary sherbet lemons on Dumbledore's desk, wondering if it would be better or worse to look as ashamed as he felt.

"But I believe Miss Evans to be in capable hands," Dumbledore went on, folding his own long-fingered hands in front of him on his desk.

"But Madam Pomfrey is letting Snape in there to see her!" James said, almost frantic. "Sirius said he was there last night, and he'd come back this morning, and he was ready to use her as a shield if I hexed her, he said so, Padfoot and Moony heard him!"

"He did say it," Sirius said, speaking for the first time. His voice didn't ring with assurance, but only because the assurance was _so_ sure of itself, it didn't need any fanfare. "He'd've done it, too."

"I can certainly see where such a possibility would have upset you greatly," Dumbledore said. "I trust none of you tested his resolve?"

"No!" James said heatedly.

"Your concern for Miss Evans' welfare does you all credit," Dumbledore replied, quite seriously. "But Mr. Snape was present in the infirmary last night because he was the one who brought Miss Evans to Madam Pomfrey."

"After he put here there!" James cried. "He's the one who cursed her!"

Something changed in the conversation, something almost imperceptible. But Remus felt it, and when Dumbledore tilted his chin slightly and directed the weight of his bright blue gaze at them, without the shield of his spectacles, the hairs on the back of Remus' neck rose.

"That is a serious accusation, Mr. Potter," Dumbledore said, although in no different a tone than he'd said anything to them. "Naturally, if you will confide in me your proof, I will investigate such a claim to its fullest extent."

"Sir," Sirius said, sounding utterly in possession of himself, "if you'd seen Snape in the hospital wing this morning, you'd have all the proof you could want."

"I am sure I agree with you, Mr. Black," said Dumbledore. "Had I been there, I would have made an excellent eye-witness. But I may have witnessed something different than you, or Mr. Potter—such is the exquisite mystery of perspective." Then the eyes turned on Remus, who felt himself twitch. "Were you there, Mr. Lupin?"

"Yes, sir," Remus managed. His throat felt dried out. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear what would come out of his own mouth if Dumbledore asked him . . .

The blue gaze was scanning lightly over him, as powerful as a laser beam. "And what is your interpretation of these events?"

Remus felt miserable. James was looking at him so imploringly, and Sirius' gray eyes and composed, almost haughty face were unfathomable . . .

"I can't say what Snape meant by—anything he did. But he did imply that he'd use her as a shield if James hexed him."

 _Will you do it, if the price is your beloved girl? All I'd have to do is be faster . . ._ It had been horrible, more horrible than Remus could ever remember Snape being. Not that Snape hadn't _tried_ being that horrible before; he had, many times; but this time it had really, really _worked_. . .

"Intriguing," said Dumbledore, as if he honestly meant it. "May I ask why you say you cannot tell what Snape meant?"

"Well," Remus said lamely, "just that. I . . . I don't know if he was being serious or not."

"Of course he was!" James said, heated and indignant. "Moony, you were there, how could you possibly even _think_ —"

"I don't know," Remus said, exasperated, but trying not to show it, "I'm just saying what I _think_ , James, that's _all."_

"He'd have done it, the slimy Death Eater snake," James said hotly. "He doesn't think she's a human being!"

"Mr. Potter," Dumbledore said in such a voice that James shut up immediately. "I do not wish you to think I don't applaud your principles, and naturally, I will not place restrictions on the conversations you have among your friends. But in my presence, and the presence of other teachers, I would prefer you not accuse your peers of certain . . . affiliations without any proof. And I am quite sure," he went on, when James opened his mouth to protest, "that on the matter of Mr. Snape's political associations, you have nothing of the kind."

"We have suspicions," Sirius said, more quietly than Remus thought he'd ever heard him.

"And intuition," Dumbledore agreed. "But we should remember, Mr. Black, that while intuition may guide us in our investigations, even the due process of law requires proof. And proof and intuition, while not mutually exclusive, are not synonymous. Now." He smiled at them all and spread his hands. "I believe the hour is growing toward Defense Against the Dark Arts with our teacher of the year, and I must speak to Mr. Lupin."

Remus felt himself go red as the bottom seemed to drop out of his chair.

"So if you will avail yourselves of your last, learning-free moments of the morning, Mr. Black, Mr. Potter— Thank you for your visit. It is so refreshing to see you in here without an irate professor or Mr. Filch standing over you," he said, twinkling.

This conclusion was so clearly outside of James' expectations that Sirius had to steer him out under obvious duress. The door shut behind them with a soft yet final-sounding _boom_ , leaving Remus with the sensation of being trapped.

"Do I seem like an ogre, Mr. Lupin?" Dumbledore was smiling at him. "Or do you fear you're in trouble?"

"I—" Remus tried to dial his voice down from a squeak. "I'm sorry, sir, I couldn't keep them out—" _That's the truth, but you didn't try very hard, did you? You never do._

"No, your friends are something of a force of nature," Dumbledore agreed. "One reason I wanted to speak to you alone. It is quite understandable that Mr. Potter should be . . . out of sorts, after the tale he related, which, I am sure, appeared to him just as he reported it here. I think I may say I possess a fair acquaintance with Mr. Potter and Mr. Black's perceptions of Mr. Snape. I am less sure of your own, however. I wonder if you might enlighten me?"

Remus blinked. "You want to know . . . what I think of Snape. Sir?" he added hastily.

"I do," Dumbledore said, smiling at him still.

Remus found himself waiting for Dumbledore to laugh and say, 'Of course not.' When he didn't, and Remus realized he was only sitting there and staring at the headmaster, he went even hotter than the face than before and blurted out the first thing that streaked into his head:

"I . . . I don't know what I think." Then he stopped, feeling ridiculous. It was almost as if Dumbledore was placing some kind of trust in him, and he couldn't think what he'd ever done to deserve it. "I, I mean—I don't think many people know what to think of _themselves_ most days—I know I don't—so about Snape—I don't even know him . . . "

He trailed off, met Dumbledore's expectant gaze, and was so mortified he felt sure he was going to vaporize in a puff of steam. God, why did he have to be so stupid? Maybe this was really a last-ditch effort to allow him to retain his Prefectship, since he'd bungled it two years running. . . Dumbledore was giving him one last chance to redeem himself, and here he was, flubbing it worse than a potion . . .

"A very wise answer, Mr. Lupin."

Remus couldn't have heard right. "What?" he blurted.

Dumbledore smiled. "I like to think that, when I was your age, I would occasionally stumble upon wisdom in myself. But you know, I rather think I never did. Learning to recognize the signs of wisdom is as important as possessing it."

". . . yes, sir," Remus said, now thoroughly bewildered.

"May I make a confession to you, Mr. Lupin? I do not know what to think of Mr. Snape either. I may hazard a guess that no one in this school truly knows him. I would wager Mr. Snape does not know himself. He may have ideas, as may we all, but Truth is shy, and she comes so seldom where mortals may see her. And—you will remember my mentioning intuition to Mr. Black?—I have a feeling that it is of vital importance that we double, even triple our efforts to understand who Mr. Snape may be. I wish for you to help me."

Remus realized he was gaping. "Me?" he echoed dimly.

"It is unorthodox," Dumbledore admitted, "and no doubt, were the parents aware of my decision to involve a student in my affairs, I would receive even more letters on my incompetence as Headmaster than I already do." His eyes were twinkling again. "But they do not know you as I do—or as I think I know you. Of all the students I am blessed to be acquainted with at this school, you, Mr. Lupin, are the one I believe to be most cautious when judging another person's merit." His gaze seemed to become more piercing—it reminded Remus of the way Muggles used diamonds in lasers, to emit beams of cutting light. "Life has given you a unique perspective in that regard."

Remus swallowed.

"Will you help me, Mr. Lupin?"

"Of course, sir," Remus said automatically, "but—I'm sorry, I don't get—I mean, understand—what you want me to do?"

"I want you to keep an eye out for Mr. Snape. To . . . observe him. For his sake, as well as others'. Do you think you can do this?"

Without a doubt. All James and Sirius and Peter would be doing this term was spying on Snape; Remus might as well join in. "Yes, sir."

"Magnificent." Dumbledore smiled at him. "I look forward to delving into your perspective, Mr. Lupin. I have a feeling I will find it a most illuminating source."

* * *

 

Remus bolted through the halls to DADA class, an excuse note from Dumbledore crumpled in his hand. He skidded to a stop in front of the door at two minutes past the hour, but when he sidled into the room, he found the teacher hadn't arrived. Everyone was just gabbing and chucking bits of rubbish and enchanting paper birds to dive-bomb their friends and girls they liked.

He scanned the crowd for his friends and saw them on the window-side of the room, about halfway down: James and Sirius talking with their heads together; or rather, James' lips moving rapidly and his hands flittering butterfly-like in agitated gestures, and Sirius nodding occasionally, looking so grim and handsome that several girls were watching him with slightly glazed looks. Peter had been keeping an eye on the door, and when Remus slithered into the room, he tugged on James' sleeve.

James whipped around in his chair and shouted _across the bloody room_ : "What did Dumbledore want, Moony?"

Practically every hand swiveled around. With more than fifty pairs of eyes on him, Remus felt his face boil. For a split second, he wished he were more like his friends, and hexed people for annoying him. He sent James a really dirty look, but Sirius had already cuffed him in the back of the head.

"What _did_ D-man want, Mooony?" Felicity Meadowes asked slyly, twirling one of her ostrich-feather earrings.

"For you to mind your own business," Remus retorted. He veered to the other side of her desk to avoid the Slytherins who always tried to trip him and Peter if they were unwise enough to walk near, sped across the back of the classroom, and dived low into a seat between James and Sirius.

"Sorry," James said sheepishly as Remus glared at him anew. "I wasn't thinking—"

"Well, ring the _Daily Prophet_ , because there's a headline," Remus snapped. James' grin was even more sheepish, and he fluffed his hair, embarrassed. Sirius laughed and leaned on Remus' shoulder.

"This is a better volume, Prongs," he said around Remus' back. "Watch and learn." He laid all his weight on Remus' shoulder, tilting him toward him, and put his lips right next to Remus' ear. "What did Dumbledore want, Moony?" he whispered.

"What?" said Peter, his face squinching. "I didn't hear."

"That's the point, Wormtail, you dimwit," Sirius said wearily. Peter blushed.

"Sirius—" Remus was saved from having to really answer by the teacher's finally tottering into the room.

"All right, settle down, you lot," he said uselessly, as Bobby Mackerel charmed a paper crane to fly down the front of Marnie Dobbins' robes and she hurled an ink bottle at him.

"These classes are such a joke," Sirius muttered into Remus' ear; he was still leaning on him. "You'd think Dumbledore would get we actually need to learn to defend ourselves, not spend the year tossing off—"

"Where's Mr. Snoop?" the teacher asked, looking around at them all. Quite a few people laughed; the professor looked embarrassed, clearly understanding he'd got Snape's name wrong.

"Probably skiving off," Mulciber called casually. Whether this response was from disdain for the teacher or a desire to get Snape in trouble, Remus couldn't tell. Well, there was no law saying people couldn't combine two destructive desires. People did it all the time, in fact, even his own best mates. James and Sirius liked to pretend that wasn't what they were doing—they might even believe they weren't—but Slytherins probably considered it a waste of potential if a single act didn't accomplish five different nasty things.

"No one's seen him?" the professor asked distractedly, as a smoking ball of rubbish winged past his ear and ricocheted off the blackboard.

No one answered, not even James or Peter. Sirius just kept pressing his weight on Remus' shoulder.

"Well, if anyone does see him, ask him to come to me, would you? All right then, let's get out our textbooks—"

They copied notes out of the textbook—or a few people looked like they were pretending to; most people didn't even bother with that. Sirius tilted his chair back on its legs, his arms folded behind his head, while James hissed Snape-theories at Peter, who was listening raptly. The Slytherins were clearly making jokes between each other in voices pitched too low to carry, but punctuating them with laughs that traveled to the front of the classroom. Even Remus only used a spell to highlight the lines in his textbook, although this shortcut was due in part to needing the time to figure out what he was going to tell James about his special assignment from Dumbledore (which he still didn't understand). Surely Dumbledore had teachers to keep an eye on Snape?

Or maybe. . . sometimes Remus thought Dumbledore had made him a prefect in order to give him some control over James and Sirius. It had never worked, Remus thought bitterly. In the beginning, they'd even tried to get him to take points for fun, until McGonagall overheard them egging him to go on, do it, and she gave Remus such a verbal thrashing that he'd almost fainted. After that, they'd never brought it up again. . . but Remus knew that had been down to their forbearance, feeling guilty for getting him in trouble; it wasn't about anything he'd done. He'd probably disappointed Dumbledore horribly. Remus _hated_ disappointing people, especially if he liked them.

But if Dumbledore had given him this assignment to keep his friends from pursuing some. . . some vigilante justice against Snape, and his friends were determined more than _ever_ to pursue vigilante justice against Snape, Remus was going to have to disappoint _someone_. And he knew, with a bitter flash, who it was going to wind up being.

Chairs were scraping, chatter swelling to distracting levels. Remus blinked away the fog of reverie. "It's not time to go?" he said, bewildered.

"Where've you been, mate?" Sirius asked. "Down memory way?"

"Something like that." Remus glanced at the other students, who were scattered in clumped formations, most leaning on desks and talking, a few—the Slytherins, predominately—remaining seated and so obviously bored he could see it across the room.

"We're practicing Shield Charms," Peter said. "Moony, would you—?"

"So what did Dumbledore want?" James interrupted.

Remus sighed. He figured that, all things considered, honesty was the best policy. After so many years of coming up with werewolf excuses, he'd become a practiced liar, but he wasn't a practiced _good_ liar. All he was able to do was lie with a straight face in a reasonable voice to give himself enough time to escape, but half an hour later, the person he'd lied to would figure out the story didn't make any sense, and then Remus would get hunted down again for the _real_ truth.

So he said honestly, "He asked me to keep an eye on Snape."

Peter's eyes went round as gumballs. Even James looked taken aback. Then an expression of fierce satisfaction stole onto his face.

" _Brilliant_ ," James breathed. "We'll have the truth out of that greaseball in no time, and Evans'll be safe."

"Maybe so," Remus said, trying to smother all signs of his frantic praying that he could handle this right. "But I'm not sure you're really thinking about what this means, James. Dumbledore asked me to _keep a watch_ on Snape. That means we can't go around"— _tormenting him_ —"needling him with pranks and things."

"This isn't about pranking!" James said indignantly. At least he wasn't shouting, and nobody was paying any attention to them except a few nearby girls, whose attention was all on Sirius, anyway, as he stood at Remus' and James' elbows with his arms crossed. "This is about—about _justice_ and— _protecting_ Evans from that slimy evil bastard!"

"You can't go around practicing justice when the Headmaster's got his eye on us," Remus insisted. His stomach was twisting up in knots and he was starting to feel shaky. "If he sets me to watching Snape and then Snape ends up in the hospital wing, what d'you think Dumbledore is going to say?"

"You wouldn't be involved! We keep you out of it, Moony, you know we do—"

"You're missing the _point_ ," Remus said helplessly. He looked to Sirius for help, even though he knew it wouldn't do any good; Sirius just looked impassive. "I'm already a prefect, James, which is a responsibility from the Headmaster, and now I have an even more explicit responsibility that he _gave_ me—he doesn't want vigilante justice, he wants—"

"How are our Shield Charms going, boys?" asked the professor in a would-be friendly voice, although it was obvious he wasn't feeling too friendly toward anyone in that classroom.

"Wormtail," Sirius said boredly, "hex me."

"Er." Peter looked taken aback and not very pleased, but he raised his wand and said determinedly: " _Furnunculus_!"

Sirius' Shield Charm was so strong, Peter toppled across the desk, over the side and to the floor. Several of their classmates burst into laughter.

"Sirius!" Remus said, exasperated, helping a crimson-faced Peter to his feet.

"Sorry, Wormtail," Sirius said, but he was grinning. "I hope you bounced."

"Well." The teacher tried to look professional, not annoyed or taken aback. "Good charm-work, Mr. Block—keep it up, boys—" And he beat a hasty retreat. Sirius sneered at his back.

"You okay?" Remus asked Peter, trying to keep his annoyance at both James _and_ Sirius out of his voice.

"Yeah," Peter mumbled, still scarlet in the face.

"Moony—" James started again.

"Unless it's about Shield Charms, I don't want to hear it," Remus snapped, his palms feeling damp.

"Fine," James snapped back. "Although it's sure funny you care anything about _protection_ when you won't help me save Evans—"

 _Oh, I'm so sorry I'm standing in your way of hexing whoever you like!_ Remus thought angrily, keeping his lips pressed together. _Or maybe you'll tell me it's not about that, it's about Snape being such a slimy evil Death Eater, you're just doing the right THING._

Didn't James understand what it was _like_ to hear people talking about what someone _deserved_ to get, because everyone _knew_ they were evil?

 _Of course not,_ said Remus' Inner Ravenclaw. _He's not a werewolf, he doesn't hear people saying that sort of thing and meaning him._

A sudden susurration in the back of the room made Remus look up:

Snape had walked in.

Remus's stomach seemed to cower at a point between his shoes.

"You're late, Mr. Snip," said the teacher. For a moment, he seemed relieved to have something to focus on besides the recalcitrant students he'd been dealing with for the last forty-five minutes; but his relief evaporated quickly enough when Snape gave him a stare of such contempt it was almost artistic.

"I was in the hospital wing," Snape said. It wasn't Remus' imagination that Snape's gaze lingered on James for a moment, or that the faintest sneer traced across his face; and then Remus felt like dirt because he'd been fighting with James, one of his best mates, who honestly cared about him, over a boy who so often seemed purely, objectively horrible.

 _But it's not right for them to treat Snape the way they do,_ his Inner Hufflepuff reminded him. _Just because Snape is the way he is—and that's not something_ you _can help—it doesn't mean you shouldn't try to help what_ they _do._

The problem was, James and Sirius didn't think that way. And that's why Remus was fighting with his best friends.

"Well, all right," the professor said, as one who just wanted the period to be over so he could get away from all of them. "We're doing Shield Charms, you can just—in the time left—here, partner Looper, would you, Mr. Snap? Shield Charms—there you go—" And he fled them for the second time.

 _Oh great_. Remus stared at Snape, who stared back. He had practiced the charm at the end of the holidays, but what he'd managed decently enough in the Potters' sitting-room seemed very far away when you were looking into Snape's insolent black eyes.

Snape didn't say anything to him, however. He only sneered at Peter, Sirius and James, whose expressions were alarmed and, in James' case, determined, too. Sirius... looked something darker. Peter's huge eyes were peering around Sirius' arm, where he was still hiding.

"Don't worry, Black," Snape said. Something about his voice had changed—not in the previous minute, but from before, from all the years Remus had been exposed to him so far. He couldn't even identify what exactly had changed; it was just part of that... different-ness about Snape; that strange something that curled around the back of his mind like instinct. "I'll return your little boyfriend to you in one piece."

Sirius' face darkened with hatred. Remus put his palm to his own face. Why did they all have to be so bloody difficult? He should _let_ them finish each other off, and good bloody riddance to a fat lot of headaches.

"Excuse me," he said tartly, because for some weird reason he didn't feel physically sick when he fought with people he didn't like, "I'd like to practice Shield Charms at _some_ _point_ in this lesson. Can we, Snape?"

"If you can manage one, Lupin," he said disdainfully. Remus blinked. Compared to tones and looks and things Snape had said to him before, that was mild as a summer's day.

"Don't worry about me," he replied coolly. "Are you ready?"

"You'd better watch yourself, Snape," Sirius said in a low, dangerous voice. James nodded tightly.

Snape did something truly horrific: he ignored them. Remus almost groaned. James and Sirius weren't nearly as enraged by most insults as they were by blatant ignoring.

" _Aguamenti_!" Remus said hastily, choosing something relatively harmless; although he thought he heard Peter laugh a loud and nasty one over the jet of pouring water. Dammit, he hadn't even _meant_ it as some sort of assault on Snape's hygiene—

Snape blocked it with no effort; the water shot harmlessly off to both sides, pattering onto the stone floor. He looked disgusted with Remus' stupidity. "Are you trying to _bore_ me unconscious, Lupin?"

That was so innocuous for Snape that Remus felt his eyes rolling. "I'm so sorry I was trying to _not_ use a horrible spell."

"You could use whatever spell you wanted, Lupin, and you couldn't touch me with it."

"Oh please," Remus said. "I listen to enough posturing all day—"

"Oy!" James said heatedly, making Remus wince. He swiveled to face his friends, feeling both embarrassed and exasperated.

"Don't you have something you should be doing?" he hissed, blushing.

"We're trying to protect you, you stupid oik!" James said, his cheeks red with indignation.

"But if you want us to _leave_ you to him—" Sirius' voice came out in an actual growl. The hairs along the back of Remus' neck rose. Less than a split second later, he realized it wasn't the tone of Sirius' voice, it was the prickle of a spell—

Snape's Protego slammed to life, flaring up from the floor to the ceiling so hard Remus was knocked clean off his feet and a chair exploded into bits. The light from the blocked curse rocketed along the rippling shield like a fireworks show, its afterimages branding themselves on the backs of Remus' eyelids.

Remus shook his head to clear it, realizing as he did that the buzzing noise in his ears was girls (and Peter) shrieking and James crying, "Moony? Moony! Are you all right?" and Snape jabbing him in the back and saying, "Lupin, would you get off me?"

"Sorry," Remus said blankly, blinking to clear his eyes; his head was full of purple and crimson light, and he couldn't see anything. Someone grabbed him by the arms and hauled him to his feet. He smelled sandalwood soap and faint sweat and cigarette smoke; Sirius. He was brushing Remus' robes down in long, stern strokes.

"What in Merlin’s balls was that?" he demanded.

"It was a Shield Charm, you cretinous troll," Snape replied. Remus' eyes were still full of a network of shimmering lights, but the disgust was as strong as the Protego had been.

"Who fired that spell?" the professor was asking frantically, over the sound of teenagers babbling.

"Why can't I see?" Remus said, rubbing his eyes. In the closed-in space around him, everything suddenly went quiet. Even Snape was silent. "Padfoot?" Remus asked, his voice going higher. Oh God.

"I'm taking you to the hospital wing," Sirius said gruffly. He took Remus by the shoulders, his grip almost vice-like. "I'm taking him," he said to someone nearby, "there's something wrong with his eyes."

The bell trilled. Remus heard the sound of desks scraping and students stampeding toward the door, although a few people's voices rattled in his ears as they crowded close to ask what had happened.

"Move, you morons," Sirius bellowed at them, and the suffocating pressure of bodies around Remus dissipated as if blasted away.

Remus kept his eyes shut as Sirius maneuvered him out of the classroom and into the hall, where the chillier air folded around him. Maybe if he kept his eyes closed, they'd heal faster.

 _If_ they healed—

"That was a Dark spell," he heard James' breathless voice say as Sirius pulled him down the corridor, "wasn't it, Padfoot?"

"Yeah." Sirius bit off the word like he was trying to kill it with his teeth. "It was."

"It wasn't Snape," Remus said automatically.

Sirius stopped as suddenly as if he'd crashed into Snape's Protego. "Moony," he snarled, "how can you stick up for that sick bastard when one of his fucking mates tried to hit you with _Dark fucking magic_ —"

"Snape isn't responsible for what his friends get up to," Remus said, keeping his eyes shut tight; but the anger that was radiating off Sirius was as unsettling and palpable as the look on his face would be.

"Everyone in this school has gone _fucking_ crazy," he managed, his voice shaking. Then his grip on Remus' arm clamped tighter than ever, and he hauled him down the corridor.

 _Can't keep an eye on Snape if you're blind,_ whispered a little voice inside Remus' head.

* * *

 

Sirius was livid. He knew—he _knew_ who was behind all this—that sick bastard, that evil, twisted son of a whore, Snivellus Snape.

He'd done something to both of them, to Evans _and_ Remus, Sirius could see it now. On the train, when they were in that compartment with him—he'd put some Dark curse on Lily, Imperio'd Remus, maybe—or who knew what all the Dark Arts could do, because if Remus hadn't been fighting with Prongs over _defending Snape_ , Sirius wouldn't've known something was _wrong_. But there was nothing right about that. Going around defending people who didn't deserve it was just the way Moony was; but he'd always let it go when they laughed or pointed out all the ways Snivellus was a greasy, nasty little Death Eater in training. He'd never got in the way of them doing what they had to do, even if he would sometimes look at them in a way that made Sirius' stomach twist with a weird, alien shame. But Snivellus now had _both_ Remus and Evans outright defending him, people who had less than no reason to—oh, he'd done something to them, all right.

And when Sirius found out what it was, what he'd do to Snape... the sick, evil bastard would be _begging_ Sirius to just fucking kill him...

He shoved open the infirmary doors. If he hadn't been so wound up about Moony and Snape, the sight of Evans dressed and on her feet, talking to Dumbledore and Pomfrey, would've stopped him in his tracks. But all he cared about was that if Pomfrey had healed her, that meant she could figure out what that sick shit had done to Remus—

"Evans?" Prongs cried, and sped up the ward toward her.

Evans turned toward them, looking better but still pretty beat-up, like some dragon pox-survivor. As soon as she saw James headed toward her, the look on her sickly face switched to alarm and she took a step back. Her eyes flew over the rest of them, as if she was searching for a way out. When she noticed Moony, who was clearly injured, a look of anger and something else crossed over her face. "If you've all been _fighting_ again with Severus—"

"Someone tried to hit him with a Dark curse during Defense," Sirius snarled. If he had to listen someone else defend Snape, he was going to hex them, he didn't care about Prongs' fancy—

Pomfrey hurried forward, her face pale and grim, her wand out. "What this school is coming to," she said, sending an almost angry look at Dumbledore. She went to take Remus' arm, but Sirius glared her off and helped Moony to sit without her help.

"Padfoot," Remus whispered, sounding miserable, but he still had his eyes tight shut, so he hadn't seen anything. Could he tell how furious Sirius was? Or was he worried he was going to be _blind_?

"Be quiet and let Pomfrey fix you," Sirius grunted. He wanted to find those Slytherin sons-of-bitches and rip their bones apart.

Pomfrey was waving a net of magic over Remus, her face growing paler as she did. Dumbledore had come over to the bed and stood looking gravely down on Moony, but apart from having his eyes shut, he looked fine.

Apart from that.

"Mr. Lupin doesn't need a circus around him," Pomfrey said tightly. "Everyone needs to go."

There was a scuffle off to the side; Sirius barely needed to look to know it was Prongs trying to talk to Evans, and her hissing at him. He heard the sound of footsteps pelting off at a run, and the infirmary doors banging. She'd cracked, she had. Snape's doing. He could bloody well have the dozy bint.

"Sorry—" Prongs said breathlessly. "I'll be back, I've just got to—" And he took off—after Evans, leaving Moony when he was blind, for some stupid bird who didn't even fancy him even when her Death Eater boyfriend hadn't bloody hexed her—picking up speed like he was going to try to overtake her. Sirius turned to glare at him as he went and saw Wormtail scurrying after.

The infirmary doors thudded behind them all.

 _Good fucking riddance,_ Sirius thought.

Only it didn't feel like he meant it.


	16. Chapter 16

Severus watched Black drag Lupin away with his eyes shut, Potter and the rat trailing. They were headed to Pomfrey, no doubt, but she wouldn't be able to fix the backlash of a Dark curse. Dark magic demanded knowledge to use it in any way, whether you were curing it or cursing it.

The aborted curse had probably been Mulciber's doing. Severus wasn't sure which of them Mulciber had been trying to hit, although if Severus' Protego had been too slow or shattered, it would have been both him and Lupin lying as victims on the floor of the Defense classroom.

Dark magic under a professor's nose—yes, that seemed like Mulciber. He'd always been reckless for a Slytherin, taking his shots where he had a reasonable chance of getting away with them. And Severus vaguely remembered this professor as a rather contemptible waste of a Dark Arts defender. Hadn't Lucius pushed for his hiring—one of his first acts on the Board of Governors? A little joke to amuse the Traditionalist fathers who turned blind eyes to their sons' more dangerous recreational activities. All of the angry marks on the records of their precious heirs had infuriated a lot of the families who'd once approved of the Dark Lord...

Severus made sure his wand was in his hand, though he kept it mostly concealed in the folds of his robes. Should he go find Mulciber, or should he not? No; he could only be a Gryffindor about this when it was expedient. Hunting up Mulciber in a froth would be reckless; they'd be waiting for that, he and Avery and Rosier, probably with Wilkes, too, and maybe even Haddock, who always tried to tag along...

He headed in the opposite direction of the Great Hall or the Slytherin dungeons, sneaking up a concealed passageway he'd only discovered as a professor. The infirmary; that's where he needed to be. Perhaps the suppressant he'd given Lily would have taken effect by now, fooling Pomfrey into thinking she had somehow recovered—

He heard the pattering of feet out in the wider corridor ahead a second before Lily's voice, raised to angry desperation: "No, Potter! For the last time, leave me _alone_!"

"Evans, would you _stop_?" Potter sounded no less desperate. "Stop running down the stairs! You'll hurt yourself—"

"I'll stop running when you stop following me!"

Severus skidded to a stop just before he ducked into the corridor; he wasn't going to show Potter and whatever minion that he'd been running toward them. He whipped out into the vault of staircases, relieved to find that he was only a flight below Lily, even if it was on a separate staircase.

"Sev!" she cried, leaning over the balustrade at the sight of him. Her face, about two meters above, sparkled with relief.

Then his heart vanished out of his chest when she swung her legs over and _jumped over the rail_ —

He lunged forward to catch her—saw Potter scrambling behind her to do the same, but she was already plummeting toward the staircase below—and she slammed into Severus' arms with a grunt, staggering them backward into the opposite balustrade. He almost slipped, which would've rolled them down the stairs, maybe even into empty air; but he leaned backwards against the rail and locked his knees and they stayed put.

"Are you fucking crazy?" he panted. He want to shove her off and shake her, but his arms seemed to have latched around her shoulders.

She was _grinning_. Her skin was too pale, looking thin and breakable as paper; her eyes too large with shadows; but his heart, which had returned to him to hammer with panic, turned over; she was so beautiful. "You say such romantic things to me," she said. She tightened her hand on the front of his robes; he felt her fingers slipping through the hair on the back of his neck, and with a sense of absolute disconnect he understood what she was about to do—he couldn't move—

Something crashed onto the staircase above them; both Severus' and Lily's heads turned, although Severus could barely think; could barely register that Potter had jumped onto the stairs above them and was pulling himself up, wincing, looking white and livid and almost frightened.

"Snape," he uttered, "you're going to tell me right now what you've done to her— _right now_ —"

"I think I just saved her from breaking her neck," Severus said. But his voice sounded off-kilter, and he couldn't unlock his arms and stand up straight and sneer the way he wanted. He could barely think because _the curse had almost made Lily kiss him_ and he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so pathetic.

"I was trying to get away from you, Potter," Lily said angrily. "It's _you_ who's done something to me, if anyone, by driving me absolutely bloody mad! Go _away_!"

"But you hate him!" Potter cried, like he was the one being driven mad. "You remember what he called you? How can you even talk to him, let alone act like—like—"

"You don't know anything about me and Severus," Lily said fiercely. "You never did! Just leave us _alone_!"

She grabbed Severus, who still felt pole-axed, and dragged him away. He saw Pettigrew gaping at them over the staircase above, and Potter standing stock-still where he'd jumped. Potter put out his hand, like he was reaching for her; he even took a step forward; but in the end he stayed, looking after them with an expression of bewilderment and... hurt. The sight of it made Severus feel like his heart was being carved out, because the only reason that emotion was on Potter's face and not his was a fucking Dark magic curse.

Lily's palm felt like it was branding him through his clothes.

He let her drag him down the halls, through a passageway and up a back staircase to an empty classroom high in the same tower as Divinations, where someone had amused themselves stacking the desks in postmodern artistic formations. The room smelled like neglect and mildew, and the light dusting down from the small windows on high was weak, anemic.

"Here." She kicked the door shut and locked it with a spell. She had not once let go of him; in fact, as they'd walked, her hand had slipped down to his, her fingers threading through his own.

"I can't guarantee they won't find us," she said. "They've got this map, it shows you where everyone is—"

His grip tightened cruelly on her hand at this nasty revelation. "Is _that_ what that was," he snarled, thinking suddenly of her son and his _spare bit of parchment._ He had often wondered how those bastards were able to sneak up on him so effectively, no matter where he went.

"I won't let them hurt you," she said. Her determination was almost simplistic, and she stared into his face with promise equally pure. She was still holding his hand. And it was a curse; it was all from a curse.

"Spoken like a true Gryffindor," was all he was able to say. It was amazing how his voice could sound nearly normal when his heart was splintering.

She smiled, so truly warm and faintly happy. "You wouldn't let anyone hurt me either," she said with simple truth. "What's that make you?"

 _So much in love with you, it breaks my heart._ "Another fool."

She laughed.

He tried to remove his hand, but she didn't budge, only smiled at him. It was like a knife under his skin, peeling it away from his muscles. "I need my hand," he rasped.

"I don't think so," she said, pulling it against her stomach. "I think I'll get a lot more use out of it."

Merlin, was his voice shaking? "Thinking is never a Gryffindor's strong suit. I don't suggest you try it."

"Fine," she said, "you win." She let go of him, but before he could snatch himself away, she wrapped both her arms around his left. He jerked, but she only grinned.

"You can't escape me," she said, and _nuzzled his cheek._ Oh Christ, if he didn't get this curse off her, he was going to jump off the Astronomy Tower and kill himself.

"You're more tenacious than a Snargaluff Pod." He used the excuse of rooting in his bag to dislodge her for a moment, and then snatched himself behind one of the desks, putting his bag firmly between them and hiding his hands inside, because they were shaking.

But his relief was short-lived: she nudged a chair next to his and sat down so close her knee rubbed along his, and then she draped herself over his left arm, laying her head on his shoulder.

"What are you doing?" he garbled.

She moved her head so that she could just glance up at him. "You don't like it?"

 _I wish I'd stayed dead._ "It strikes me as unnecessary."

"I just like touching you," she said, on a little sigh, and snuggled back into his arm. "It makes me feel... peaceful. Warm."

A drop of ice slithered down past his heart. He fumbled in his bag and ripped out the wood-bound book, paging through it roughly until he found the section of Heart Spells, not caring that he was jostling her; but she still didn't bloody release him and sit back.

He hadn't finite'd the Illuminati spell; the words still glowed black and gold on the page. His eyes darted over the patches of light and dark, searching—and there, he found it.

The Bonding Spell.

"Sev?" Lily asked, in a voice as soft and intimate as if they were the only two people in the entire castle. His heart lurched.

He shoved the book into her hands. "Read that," he rasped, pointing to the cluster of text with a shaking finger.

He pulled away from her and paced to the other side of the room, hoping she would leave him be, at least while she read—and yet the chill against his now-empty side where she'd pressed herself seemed to sink into his flesh, down to his bones. He couldn't let her do what she wanted, what the spell would make her do—when she returned to her normal self, she would despise him; she would have been violated—

Her soul had been violated by this spell.

"'The Bonding Spell is used to bind one person's heart to another.'" Lily read as if they were in class and the teacher had asked her to recite aloud from the book. "'It is deeply unnatural, for it establishes a one-way parasitic bond that can never be sated. Also known as the Curse of the Unrequited, it binds the heart of the victim to the physical body of the object. If unbroken, the Bonding Spell will poison the victim with their yearning. The victim will crave the touch of their beloved more with each passing day, until their life is drained from them, and they die the death of unrequited passion.'"

She was silent. He was glad his back to her, so he couldn't see her face—so she wouldn't see his.

"So... what?" she asked curiously.

He blinked. For a moment he didn't move. Then he spun toward her, incredulous. " _So what_?" he repeated. "What do you think that sounds like?"

"Like a pretty nasty curse. You want to put this on someone?" she asked, raising her eyebrows. It was unnatural; she shouldn't even be joking about that. The spell was perverting all her reactions, her thoughts. That's why she was running away from Potter and being mean to him, the way she wasn't recoiling in horror from the thought of him putting a Dark curse on someone that would _kill._

He stalked forward and snatched the book out of her hands. "'Symptoms,'" he barked. "'Feelings of unnatural cold, except when in the presence of the object. An increased need for touch, but only of the object; all other persons, especially those of the same sex as the object, will become hateful in the eyes of the victim'—who do you think this sounds like? It's you! Someone's put this curse on you, you—daft girl!"

Lily looked completely unbothered. "I can see why you'd say that, but it doesn't sound like me at all. I like being with you because it's you. Besides, you cured me this morning."

His grip was so convulsive on the book, he thought he might snap it in half. "I didn't cure you, I gave you a suppressant. The curse is still in you—in fact, you need to take another dose of the suppressant within the hour." He ripped through his bag and found the other vial of opalescent blue liquid, which he thrust at her. "Here," he ground out.

Lily just stared at it, as if only mildly interested. "I'm not under any bonding curse, Severus," she said calmly. "I may be under a curse, but not that one."

He ignored this, because it was all he could do. "I will break it tonight."

She shook her head. "You won't break it if you don't know what it really is."

"I know what it is," he grit out, "but it's immaterial because all cures of this magnitude are the same."

"Severus." She laid her fingers over his hand, which was still gripping the vial of suppressant. Her touch was warm and light at first, but then it gripped his hand hard, much harder than she should have. He looked into her face, and he saw, beneath the calm engendered by his potion, a darkness waiting, the hint of something almost avaricious. Because, as the book had said, this curse forged unnatural desires from the natural heart of its victim, and nothing was ever enough.

"It's not a curse," she said quietly. "I know, because I l—"

_**NO** —_

The word seared through his mind like it was being etched into him with molten metal.

" _Don't_." He pushed at her, helpless, almost blind. "Don't—you can't—never—say that—"

"But—"

"DON'T." He pulled away from her, but she followed, her fingers trailing the seams of his robes. He could hardly breathe. "When it's over," he said, in a panic, "tell me when it's over—say whatever you want once I've cured you, once I've broken the curse, and I'll listen—but right now you _cannot_ —"

"All right," she murmured. "All right." Her hand stole up to his face, her fingertips curling on his cheek. She stroked his skin, and her nails bit. They didn't break the skin; not yet.

"Drink this," he said, numb to his bones, pressing the vial into the hand trailing along his jaw. "You're feeling cold, aren't you? This will make you warmer."

"Or you could," she said softly.

He wanted to be sick. "Don't make me Imperio you."

She only laughed. But she took the vial and drank it down. "To please you," she said. He turned his face away when she leaned in, and her lips brushed along his jaw.

Tonight couldn't come soon enough.

* * *

 

Lily was shivering. She tried not to, because it upset Sev, but she just felt so cold.

"We're almost there," he said tightly, his grip crushing her hand. She smiled in the dark.

"I'm fine as long as you're here," she said. His whole body seemed to jerk, as if attached to a fine wire; he turned his face away, so that she couldn't see anything but the pale curve of his jaw and his hair falling over the side of his face. She frowned. Every time she said something like this, he acted as if she were hurting him. And he'd been jittery all day, pulling away from her when he shouldn't have. Didn't he like touching her?

"Here," he said suddenly, stopping. Lily stopped, too, her cloak clutched around her throat, and looked around. Even though it was only dinner-time, the sun set so early and the forest grew so close with trees that she couldn't see much outside the tint of the Lumos.

"We'll have to do this by moonlight," Severus said. He pulled her forward, out of the nighttime shade of the trees, and she found they were walking across a wide clearing brushed with the silver glow of the moon. It hung waning in the sky, amidst a net of diamond-bright stars.

"That's lovely," she said, her words misting in the night. She wanted to enjoy being in the midst of beauty like this, Severus beside her, but she only kept shivering, and he was one minute distant, the next agitated, as if he were wounded, and he wouldn't tell her why.

"Here," he said, his voice equally quiet, as he drew to a stop in the center of the frozen clearing. "This is where you'll stand."

"What about you?"

"I must do the spell." He tightened his grip on her hand for a moment, and then began to pull away.

She stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. "Be done quick."

He ripped his hand from hers and stepped back from her, his face turned away. She stood, tremors of cold pulsing through her, wrapping her cloak around her as tightly as she could.

"I'll return in a moment," he said curtly over his shoulder, and vanished into the underbrush. She heard crackles and rustles, at times distant, as she stood feeling colder and colder without him, like her soul was turning to ice. Then he returned, dragging a heavy, cast-iron cauldron.

"Sev?" she asked, her voice quavering. She needed to go to him.

"I will need quiet to concentrate," he said without looking at her. "Stay there." His voice was like a whip crack; she couldn't disobey it. She had no choice but to tuck her arms tight around herself and wait.

He slung the satchel down from his shoulder and flipped it open, going to kneel beside the cauldron. She watched as he removed sachets and little bags one after the other, sprinkling them on the frozen grass around him. She couldn't tell in the patchy moonlight if they were labeled, but Severus didn't even glance at them. He gazed into the cauldron as he untied the first bag and tipped a few pinches of its contents in; and the second, the third and the fourth. With his wand he poured a stream of water inside in one smooth movement, while in his left hand he slid a stirring rod from his bag, slipped it into the cauldron and began to stir. He added more ingredients, while looking into the cauldron the whole time, his lips moving slightly as he stirred; and then a haziness began to rise around him as the potion started to steam. She smelled something acrid, something that tickled the back of her throat in a way that made her gag faintly, but Severus didn't even flinch.

He stood from the cauldron, but he still didn't look at her. With one of the bags in his hand, he turned his back to the smoking cauldron and began to walk away from it—no, in a circle; in a circle around her, casting white, sandy powder from the bag. She turned to watch him all the way around; the radius was at least three meters.

She realized he was barefoot. The sight knifed a sympathetic chill down into her stomach.

He had closed the circle at the cauldron. She opened her mouth to call to him, at the same moment he dumped the remainder of the white powder into the cauldron. She gasped, feeling her throat constrict, as a cloud of putrid-smelling white smoke bubbled into the air, almost hazing him from her sight. She pressed her hand over her mouth, trying to block out that stench, but it seemed to have crawled into her nose and mouth, down her throat—

He still did not look at her.

The cauldron was in his hands. In the opposite direction he began to walk around the circle, pouring the potion in a steady stream onto the white powder as he went. The wretched smell rose around her, almost choking; she pulled her cloak up over her mouth so she could breathe, but it was getting everywhere. She heaved, hacking up something black and viscous, something that smelled even worse than the smoke pouring up from the grass. She felt ice splintering through her veins; she fell to her hands and knees, heaving, feeling as if something were crawling out of her heart, into her throat, trying to force its way out of her mouth—

"Lily."

Across the flickering smoke, through the haze of magic, she saw Severus looking at her. She felt as if something inside him had connected to her soul.

He pulled something long and dark from the sleeve of his robe.

A knife.

He stretched out his arm, across the circle, pressed the blade against his wrist, and _cut_.

His blood looked black in the moonlight. It welled across his wrist and began dribbling downward, staining the smoke with hisses. Lily gasped, hacking. The smell changed from putrid to sickly sweet; her knees felt weak, and a faint, slow warmth began to blossom beneath her skin. She couldn't look away from Severus' arm, streaming a thin line of blood—

He turned his wrist to the side and cut it deeper. She realized she'd begun to cry.

For a third time he walked around the circle, back in the direction he'd first done, his left arm dropping blood as he went. She heard him speaking, but she couldn't make out the words—she could only hear the low thrum of his voice, curling across her skin, threading deep into her psyche. The dark forest around her seemed to be graying out, as if the smoke were obscuring everything, even Severus—she could feel the cold of the air on her skin, the coldness beneath; she could smell the potion and the white powder and the frozen earth tinted with his blood; and the warmth rising through her, like the sun over the horizon in the morning when it gilded the sight—it was flooding her, turning everything that was once dark and now gray to gold, so bright and dazzling she cried out—

She hit the ground with a jarring thud. She blinked, shaking her head, and stared up at the moon. The sky was bright with stars, and when she breathed out she could see her breath puffing the air, but she wasn't shivering anymore. When she breathed in, she smelled nothing more than frost and grass and dirt. With a trembling hand she touched her lips, but they were dry and clean, not caked with anything foul that had come up from deep inside her.

She tested her arms and knees and feet. Everything seemed to be working. Wincing, she pushed herself up to sitting. Her eyes darted around the clearing, looking for—

Severus had fallen to his knees on the other side of the circle; she could still see it smoking faintly, low to the ground. He was leaning on the knife, as if it were the only thing propping him up, his young face carven with exhaustion, his hair hanging across his cheeks.

He was looking at her.

She couldn't speak.

"Are you... all right?" he asked, his voice grating with exertion, as if he'd just run five miles.

She could only nod. She wanted to ask, _Are you?_ but she couldn't find her voice.

His eyes didn't shift. "Are you cold?"

She shook her head. He closed his eyes, and his whole body seemed to relax.

She didn't know what to do. Before—any time before—she would have gone to him and hugged him, but right now she couldn't make herself. Even the thought of it made her want to move away from him. It felt—wrong—as wrong as it had felt to touch others when—when she'd been cursed—

Sev's eyes were glittering at her. "I told you," he said.

She flinched as if he'd thrown a hex near her head. She felt sick. Not with him, with herself—with the curse—with that horrible, _evil_ magic that had taken her friendship for him and warped it, made it unnatural and hurtful—

 _A one-way bond_ , the book had said. What a load of _fucking_ shit.

She scrambled to her feet. Her legs felt shaky and weak—all of her did—but she couldn't stay here. "I'm sorry—" she whispered. "I—I have to—I'm sorry, Sev, I'm so sorry—"

She staggered out of the circle, got her feet under her, and ran, her heart feeling as sick as her body ever had, when she had felt as if she might die from not having him in her arms.

* * *

 

Remus was lying in darkness.

He had no idea how late it was, although Madam Pomfrey had shooed Sirius out—well, not too long ago, probably, but it felt so very long a time, because it was time spent alone.

And blind.

Madam Pomfrey hadn't been able to fix it. She didn't know what he was hurt with. Sirius had left with low promises of Slytherins' bloody heads on pikes, but Remus had only felt numb.

He heard the door to the ward scrape open softly, then shut. He lay, blind and silent, praying it wasn't a Slytherin come to finish him off. He slid his hand under his pillow for his wand and held it out of sight beneath the covers. If it was Sirius, he'd be found, halfway hidden behind a curtain at the end of the ward. If it wasn't Sirius...

"Lupin."

It was _Snape._ Remus turned his head toward the voice, wishing he wasn't wearing the stupid blindfold—hell, that he wasn't _blind_ —but he had no choice. He pushed himself up to sitting.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. Then he said, "Pomfrey's in her office, you know. I'm not alone."

"And we both know how easily she's defeated by a silencing spell," Snape said flatly. For some reason, he sounded exhausted, his voice almost garroted. "I see she's not been able to heal you."

"I bet you even have some theories why." He hated how bitter his own voice sounded.

"She's not a Dark witch," Snape said. "Obviously." Remus heard the shuffle of his feet as he moved closer. Before Remus could pull out his wand and threaten him, he felt Snape's fingers on the blindfold, pulling it off.

"Give that back!" Remus said, half furious, half panicked. He screwed his eyes shut and clawed around for the cloth, but Snape only put a hand on his shoulder and shoved him, using the distraction to snatch his wand out of his hand.

"Idiot," Snape said. "Go ahead, make me Immobilize you, it'll make this a lot easier."

"Go to hell," Remus panted.

"What do you imagine this is." Snape's tired voice was full of scorn. "An assault on your virtue? Such as Black's left it. Calm yourself, Lupin. Sickly little werewolves aren't to my taste."

"Why don't you piss off, then," Remus snapped. He wondered whether he was a disgrace to Gryffindor if he didn't lunge blind at an enemy who had his wand and every possible advantage, or whether doing that would be a disgrace to common sense. The problem was, neither option was mutually exclusive.

"Since when have you developed a bark to match your bite?"

Remus froze, because Snape's fingers were _prodding at his forehead_.

He batted Snape's hand away. "What are you doing?"

"Open your eyes," Snape said. "I need to see them. And it's supremely idiotic to argue with someone who's got his eyes screwed shut."

"I don't want to go blind, you—" _Prick._

"Then you'd best let me see them. I can heal you."

"Wh—" Remus almost opened his eyes in shock, but at the last moment caught himself and pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes. "As if I'll believe _that_ , Snape," he said, and then hated himself for the way his voice shook.

Snape sighed as if Remus were being a tiresome baby. "Mulciber—I believe it was Mulciber, at any rate—tried to use Gurges Dolor on one of us. Possibly both; he's never one to miss an opportunity." Snape's disgust had a delicacy to it. "You were looking full-on at the blast on the shield when it hit, and were blinded."

"Funny, I'd noticed that."

"Then I suppose, with your massive powers of intellect, it's occurred to you that you were blinded by the residue of a _Dark curse_ , and therefore are not curable by regular means?" Snape's disgust—for Remus' intellect, probably—was nowhere near as delicate that time.

When backed into a corner, Gryffindors sought refuge in insolence. "When'd you get so pompous?" Remus asked.

"One more witty comeback, Lupin, and I walk out of here and don't come back," Snape said in a low, ominous voice.

"Snape," Remus said, his hands still pressed over his eyes. "If you were me, would _you_ let someone who hates you— _let_ them, totally voluntary—do some horrible spell on you when you'd already been blinded? By one of their _friends_?"

"If I wanted to hurt you, Lupin," Snape said coldly, "I'd have already done it."

Remus could hear his own breathing.

Snape shifted. Suddenly terrified he was leaving, Remus started to say, _Wait_ , but Snape said: "Take the night to think it over, Lupin. I can't heal you tonight anyway."

"Wh—you prick!" Remus exclaimed, completely forgetting Snape's threat.

"Eloquent as ever. I am tired, Lupin. I will be back in the morning. You may apologize then, and let me know—voluntarily—if you've decided to let me heal you. Or you can stay blind. It's your choice."

Remus felt something drop lightly onto the blankets covering his stomach. His wand.

"Snape!" he hissed. He heard Snape's slight tread pause. "I'm sorry I called you a prick." No response. "But that was low," he continued immediately. "And you know it."

"Good night, Lupin," Snape said with gentle contempt. A few moments later, straining his ears, Remus heard the doors to the infirmary click together.

"Well," he muttered into the pressing silence of the ward. "In the morning, we'll see. Maybe."

* * *

 

Lily needed a bath.

At some point of crashing through the forest and tearing across the grounds, through the chilly castle corridors and up the way-too-many staircases, Lily had fixated on that idea: that a bath would calm her down; a bath would make her feel clean and centered. Even as one part of her told her that was stupid, all it would get off was any dirt she'd picked up in the forest, another part of her was absolutely certain that a bath was going to save her sanity.

She staggered to the painting covering the Prefects' bath and moaned faintly in relief. Then she stopped, gazing at the painting in dismay, because she didn't remember what the bloody stupid password was.

"Goddammit!" she wailed.

The painting swung open and two giggling people came out. They stopped on seeing Lily.

"Oh!" Alice said, starting to giggle again. She leaned on Frank in a way that made Lily's organs twist around like they were going through a clothes wringer. "Sorry, Lily, didn't see you there."

"No, it's my fault, I'd forgotten the password," Lily said, distracted. "Is anyone else in there?"

"Nooo," Alice said slyly and giggled at the look on Frank's face; he was trying to seem sort of dignified and nonchalant, and was only managing red-faced and sort of pleased with himself.

"Great," Lily said, pushing past them, "thanks—"

"Are you feeling better, then?" Alice asked curiously. Lily winced, hoping they'd think it was only the portrait trying to close on her hip.

"I'll feel better once I've had a bath," Lily said honestly.

"I know _that_ feeling," Alice nodded. She waved and let Frank tug her away. "Have a good one, sweetie." Then they were gone, putting their heads together and murmuring. Lily wanted to bang her head against something.

She'd forgotten how sumptuous the vault of the Prefects bathroom was, or how the moonlight glittered through the diamond-paned glass. Honestly, what had those previous headmasters been thinking, building a place like this in a castle full of under-chaperoned teenagers? It was the perfect, gorgeous place for a shag, for Christ's sake.

 _Probably **trying** to get more little wizards and witches born,_ she thought, twisting the taps at random. Steam filled the air, scented like indecipherable flowers and fruit; she tugged off her clothes, kicked them into the corner, and dived into the deep end.

 _Warm_ , she thought, _really, truly warm_ —

The memory of wrapping her arms around Sev's shoulders and kissing his throat came back so suddenly she choked on a mouthful of sudsy water and came up sputtering. "That stupid _fucking_ spell!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. The painting of the mermaid looked scandalized. "Oh, shut up!" Lily snapped, kicking away from her. "As if you have any problems whatsoever!"

Lucius Malfoy had done this, hadn't he? Put that nasty curse on her—a curse that could have _killed her_ if Sev weren't some kind of genius who'd figured it out. The next time she saw Malfoy, she'd kick his balls up into his eye sockets.

 _Sev saved my life **again,** _ she thought.

The blood pouring over his wrist...

She shuddered and dunked herself under the water again, but whether she was seeking warmth or a feeling of cleanliness, she didn't know. Both, probably; she needed both. The feeling of choking up that black stuff, of being so cold she thought she might freeze to death from not touching him, seemed to have imprinted inside her. And the sight of Severus, barefoot on the ice-tipped grass, looking at her through the fog of smoke and magic, slitting his wrist open...

"This isn't working," she moaned. The feeling of being both cold and warm was familiar; but this was more like a ball of unpleasantness in her stomach, while the rest of her was warmed by the hot bathwater.

Suddenly she plunged upright in the water. Severus had _cut his wrist open_ to break the spell on her, and she'd left him out in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night!

"Oh fuck!" she wailed, scrambling out of the bath. "FUCK!" she cried when she saw the house-elves had taken her clothes. She grabbed her wand, which had been placed carefully in the pocket of one of five clean bathrobes, and shouted, " _Expecto Patronum_!"

The doe exploded into the softly lit cavern of the bathroom. "Go to Severus and bring him this message: tell me where you are and I'll come find you," she panted. The doe flicked off through the wall, her starlight glow vanishing, leaving Lily alone in the moon-drenched bathroom.

Shaking at her own stupidity, she dried herself off, then pulled on a robe and drained the tub. Then a nasty thought occurred to her. Could Severus make a Patronus? Not all wizards and witches could—it had taken a lot of people in the Order a good amount of practice to master it. And what if Severus didn't have enough happy memories, or what if they didn't work if you Occluded all your emotions away all the time?

She got to her feet to pace so she could think of how else to get a message to him without blundering around in the forest, when she heard something crinkle in her pocket. Blinking, she groped inside her robe and found a slip of folded paper.

It had Severus' handwriting on it, familiarly cramped and spiky, and yet different somehow.

 _I am well,_ the note said. _Stop working yourself into a frenzy and get some rest_.

She turned the paper over, but there was nothing else.

"How did you do that?" she asked the empty bathroom, but nothing answered her. Of course it didn't. He'd somehow enchanted the note to show up in her pocket, across the school. Was it a trick he'd learned as a professor?

"You'll have to teach me how to do that," she muttered. But she could feel herself wanting to smile.


	17. Chapter 17

_January 10, 1977_

Being blind was really boring.

Remus had been alone all last night, with no one but Madam Pomfrey for company, and she'd never been the chatty sort. After asking how he was feeling and recording his vitals, her conversation was a spent force. He'd more than half-expected James and Sirius to sneak into the wing and either blow his stricken vision off as a joke (less likely, all things considered) or feverishly plot some new revenge against Snape while kneeling on his knees (far more likely), but the entire night had lugged past without a single appearance.

Remus hoped they hadn't got detention for trying to murder Snape, but it seemed distressingly probable. You couldn't expect temperance from either of them at the best of times; and if Sirius believed Snape was responsible for Remus being blind, and James believed he was responsible for Lily looking like a barely breathing corpse, retribution—in the form of blood, explosions, and stone plaster raining from the ceilings—was a probability you could bet your life's savings on with the expectation of seeing them doubled.

Remus had planned a well-reasoned speech as to why they shouldn't act like—well, like _themselves_ —even though he knew it would blow in one ear and right out the other—if he didn't wibble out of making it, he thought disgustedly—but they'd never even shown up. He was in the midst of fretting about the predictable fatuity of his best friends, in addition to worrying rather a lot about his own blindness, when Snape lufted in, as silent as a cat's ghost.

"Lupin," he said, suddenly and out of nowhere, as if he'd materialized from thin air next to Remus' hospital bed.

Remus jumped; the bed screeched. "Shit! Could you please make noise, Snape?"

"Next time I'll throw something at you, if you prefer."

"On second thought, I'll take the shock, thanks. Are you—are you here for my eyes?" _Or just to make sarcastic jokes at my expense?_

"I said I would be, didn't I?" Snape drew closer; Remus could feel it. He fought the un-Gryffindor urge to scoot away, and not just because the metal headboard was already digging into his knobbly spine. It was as if Snape's personality was so powerful that it radiated out from him, enlarging his personal space and making others who intruded on it want to step back, instead of the other way around.

"I . . . you did," Remus said guardedly, "but I wasn't sure if you'd change your mind . . . you know, all things considered. I still don't know why you'd offer."

"Altruism isn't really what you'd expect from me, is it, Lupin." Snape's voice was mocking, sardonic, but subtle; the scorn was like a scent you could barely identify out on an open field. "Would it make you feel better if I asked for something in return?"

"I . . . don't know if I'd feel _better_ ," Remus said even more guardedly, "but it would at least make more sense."

"Well, I can oblige you. I'm looking for a promise from you."

"A promise," Remus repeated, his sinking heart sounding through his voice, about as subtle as a rock headed to the bottom of a river.

Snape was now standing even closer. His voice dipped, but somehow remained perfectly audible even though the volume was hardly detectable, like he had the power to make Remus' ears _listen_ harder.

"A year ago, you, Black and Potter and I were involved in an . . . enterprise of certain proportions, which could have been far greater and more negative than they wound up as being."

Remus felt like he'd swallowed a bucket of ice. He said nothing. He couldn't have.

"On the one hand, had I succeeded, the lot of you would have been, at best, expelled. On the other, had Black succeeded, I would have been dead and beyond the reach of caring either way that you would soon have followed . . . as I'm sure must have occurred to you. You must have been aware that infecting a wizard or witch with lycanthropy is an offense punishable by death."

"I know that, Snape," Remus said, his voice rasping in his throat.

"It doesn't surprise me that Black didn't, or wouldn't let that affect him—"

A black sickness rose in Remus like a miasma. He couldn't go back there; he couldn't, or he'd lose his mind— "What's the promise you want, Snape?"

There was the slightest pause.

"I've more or less recently come into possession of certain information to which I wasn't privy at the time," Snape said, his low voice almost casual, and yet shrewdly compelling. Instinct crawled along Remus' spine, telling him that he was being played with; he just didn't know what the game was, and when he found out, he wasn't going to like it. "To whit, that Black, Potter, and Pettigrew are unregistered Animagi—"

Remus felt all his organs vanish.

"—a dog, a stag, and a rat, respectively, and they enliven your full moon nights by liberating you from your—well, it can't be called secure isolation, but at any rate, they smuggle you out onto the Hogwarts grounds for the monthly lark."

Remus' organ-empty insides became stuffed with lead.

"I wonder if it's occurred to you that this is tantamount to assisted suicide? Should you break free of their control and bite someone, I mean. With those laws in place which we've just been discussing. Of course, if you bit only a Muggle, there would just be a fine—"

"I . . . " Everything was spinning as much as if Remus had collided with a Bludger and gone spiraling, clinging desperately to his broom, toward the ground at a hundred kilometers an hour. He clutched at what he could reach—his bed-clothes—and tried to breathe. "I—how did—what? How? You?"

"My source doesn't bear revealing," Snape said, sounding supremely unconcerned.

"Please don't expel them." Panic, fear and guilt roiled in Remus' stomach. "Please—I'll tell Dumbledore I've been getting loose, I'll leave school, but please don't make them—"

Snape made a disgusted noise. "For Christ's sake, don't make me lose my breakfast, Lupin. Your self-sacrificial loyalty is both nauseating and misplaced. You're even more mentally negligible than I'd supposed if you believe your paltry resignation would do a thing for me. If I wanted disgrace, yours would be worth five pence. Do you think I don't know who're the masterminds of their little escapades?"

"What _do_ you want?" Remus asked desperately.

"I told you; I want a promise."

"A promise to what? Not to do it?"

"And how would you stop them?" Snape asked, softly but powerfully contemptuous. "You couldn't stop them from putting a trick spider in the salt cellar at the local Sunday school."

"I know," Remus said miserably.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Lupin. You knew this was morally suspect. Knowing them as I'm privileged to do, I'm certain they talked you into it, but you bloody well let yourself be talked."

Remus struggled with twin desires, each as powerful as the other: guilt and shame, and the urge to argue. Half of him wanted to say that Snape didn't know what it was like to be shut up in that shack, afraid and alone, feeling the surging tide of red-tinged darkness as the moon rose; the wave of voices hissing _this is who you are_ as your bones cracked and your skeletal structure reshaped itself with a violence that nearly blacked you out, the pain so massive you just wanted to give in and go out; only the minute you did, that other mind would take over, the one as unknowable as the dark side of the moon, its only desire to kill until the earth ran with blood and nothing good was left. How you felt that _thing_ sitting under your skin even when there was no moon in the sky, and you wondered if one day, there would be no division between that mind that came out when the moon was full and your own. If that _was_ your mind, and the wolf was just a convenient excuse, the way everyone else believed it was.

Everyone except James and Sirius and Peter. They were the only ones who believed the wolf and Remus weren't automatically the same person. They said they understood that Remus never wanted to bite anyone, because the thought of making someone else live through this _hurt_. It would destroy a life, changing everything. They'd understood that; he'd believed it . . .

Or he thought he had. He thought they had. And when Sirius had told Snape how to find the wolf, when he'd put two people in mortal peril and nearly made Remus into . . . into a monster . . . it had been a betrayal nearly as powerful as the bite that had turned him into a monster in body. Because Sirius had almost made him a monster in soul.

But now Remus _got it_ : every time he had agreed to run around the school with his friends, overturning protections set up for himself and the students, he had been making a monster of himself. If he'd bitten or mauled someone, he'd have wanted to die, but that wouldn't have changed what he'd done.

It wouldn't have changed what he'd become.

And perhaps it was all his own fault: the fact that James and Sirius didn't understand; even Sirius' attempt on Snape's life. Because if a werewolf was flippant about his darkest half—truly flippant, not in words but in actions—then how could he expect his closest friends to be any other way?

How ironic that Remus should finally see something enormous, something so damaging, when he'd been physically blinded. Wasn't there a line somewhere, uttered by a girl in a moment when self-blindness had ceased, that went, "Till this moment, I never knew myself"? Remus knew how that girl had felt.

He looked in the direction he thought Snape must be standing. It was weird, but without being able to see Snape, Remus almost felt as if he were talking to someone else entirely, even as he knew, on a visceral level, that this _was_ Snape. Who else could know so much about them? Who else cared enough, even if it was from hatred, to find out?

"What do you want me to promise?" he asked.

For a few moments, for some reason, Snape remained silent.

"Tell Dumbledore," he said quietly, "that you don't feel your current protections are adequate. Tell him that you and I came to an understanding, if you'd like; I will corroborate it."

"Okay," Remus said, fully sincere. "Better protections. I promise. What else?"

He could practically hear Snape's eyebrows rising. "You're offering?"

"I'd have died if I bit you," Remus said quietly. "Not just you, but anyone. And not just died in . . . in body, because of the law. I wouldn't have been _me_ anymore, if I'd done that. Or if I ever do. I . . . " He hesitated, but not because he didn't want to say this; more because he didn't have the right words and he knew it. "I've been . . . really stupid. I'm sorry. I know that doesn't . . . _do_ anything . . . but I am."

To his further surprise, Snape did not immediately reply. "Your stupidity hasn't killed anyone yet, Lupin. Not everyone can say the same."

Remus' heart kicked in his chest. The bitterness in Snape's voice—did that mean—?

He _wasn't_ going to ask. Some things you were better off being blind about.

"I don't intend to," he said. He blinked his sightless eyes at Snape. " . . . thank . . . thank you."

Another silence. "Thank me?"

Remus shrugged, feeling awkward and weirdly young. Without seeing Snape, only listening to his voice, he felt like he was talking to someone a lot older. Kind of like McGonagall, only grittier.

"Adequate protections," Snape repeated after a few moments of silence had ticked past. "Enlist McGonagall, if you have to. A formative experience in his youth made Dumbledore lack belief in the power of discipline. McGonagall should be suitably impressed with the urgency if you tell her your hiding-place on the full moons has been compromised, and you're afraid some . . . industrious . . . student might think it would be a good move to release you, perhaps in the hope of nipping a few Muggle-born students."

Remus' jaw actually fell open. "Wh—but—wait, no one knows I'm a werewolf but you, or I'd be out of here on my ear, at the least. If I tell that to McGonagall, she'll assume it's you, won't she?"

"McGonagall doesn't know that I know. Outside of the four of you, Dumbledore is the only other person who knew about Black's little . . . prank."

Remus felt an upsurge of shame. "He was trying to protect me. Dumbledore, I mean." He still didn't know what Sirius had thought. Sirius' only explanation had been, _Moony, I wasn't thinking, I swear I wasn't._

 _That isn't a comfort, Sirius,_ Remus had said.

"No doubt," Snape said, absolutely cold.

Remus hesitated. "I . . . should tell you I'm not a very good liar. I kind of fall apart when people question me."

"You surprise me profoundly," said Snape, with something like dryness. "In case this isn't some upsurge of modesty, you'll have an easier time of it if you stick as closely to the truth as possible."

"So I should tell Professor Dumbledore that you and I talked and—you know, that bit?"

"If that suits you. I can also . . . " And here Remus formed a mental picture of Snape idly studying his fingernails. " . . . brew the potion I told you about. The Wolfsbane. The loss of your friends might be poignant, but your mania will still be reduced."

"I . . . " Remus' head spun. He wasn't at all sure about drinking anything Snape had brewed—especially if Snape got some confession in writing that Remus had agreed to drink a very experimental potion that—

"Wait." He sat up straight. "How did you know they affected the way I _felt_? How could you've possibly known that?"

"It stands to reason, Lupin," Snape said, so smoothly that the voice of instinct whispered to Remus that Snape was too clever and too good a liar by half. Hadn't he just been explaining to Remus _how to lie better_? "If the four of you roam free about the grounds and no one has died, then clearly they have been so far able to keep you well enough in check."

"Right," Remus said. "You're right—but I don't for a second believe you're telling me everything."

Snape sighed. "How like a Gryffindor to say it. Of course I'm not telling you everything. I can't believe you'd think I would."

Remus decided he'd kind of like to flip Snape off. Smug git. But when you wanted mercy from somebody, you needed to be meek and show the back of your neck. He settled for rolling his (useless) eyes. "I'm shocked my own self. Are you going to heal my eyes now?"

"Yes." He heard faint rustling noises. Remus' nervousness jigged back over.

"Should I have them open or closed?" he asked, trying not to do something pathetic, like cringe or clutch at the sheets.

"You might want to close them, if only to prevent any sudden pain when your vision returns. Now don't interrupt me, Lupin."

He started speaking in a low, susurrating voice; almost a chant, really, continuous, unbroken. The language was unfamiliar—old Anglo-Saxon, perhaps—and it flowed past Remus' ears like water. He felt a tingling on his face, like a nipping wind; and then stronger, stirring his hair, prickling against his skin. He could feel something tangible pressing at his face, covering his mouth and nose; an impenetrable, almost suffocating pressure. His eyes snapped open, and for a panicked second he thought, _Of course he wanted to kill me_ —

But then, like a tissue sucked into a vacuum cleaner, the pressure and the darkness vanished and light exploded in his eyes like a thousand dull pinpricks. He swore and clapped his hands over his face.

"I told you, Lupin."

Remus rubbed at his eyes before blinking them open. He squinted around the ward, which was dim, patchy with shadows; it wasn't yet dawn. He turned his head to the left, blinking at Snape, who looked—

"Jesus, Snape," Remus said, alarmed. "What did James and Sirius do to you?"

"Nothing." Snape's voice sounded normal, but his skin was waxy and dead-looking, his eyes lifeless, with shadows gouged underneath. Every shallow line in his face seemed aggravated, making him look much, much older.

"You look—unnerving. Really—you ought to lift your silencing spell or whatever you did to keep Pomfrey out and call her—"

"There's nothing she can do." Snape had stowed his wand away. "If your eyes are working their usual—better than your brain ever has—I'll be on my way."

"Fine," Remus said, letting this go. "They're fine. Thank you. Really. I—are you sure James and Sirius didn't—?"

"They couldn't have." A mote of light glinted in Snape's left eye. "I made sure they were serving a late detention with Professor McGonagall all last night."

Remus had absolutely no idea what to say. His throat was filled with an odd urge to laugh; but whether from desperation or amusement, he couldn't say. "You . . . " No; he gave up.

"I had something that needed doing," Snape said, unconcerned, "and they needed to be out of the way. Incidentally, you needn't worry too far about your friends' vociferous refusal to abandon your monthly escapades. Yesterday, a complaint was lodged with the MLE as to the activities of three illegal, underage Animagi. I forget what the punishment is for that, but I don't think it's a week's worth of detention."

Snape smiled into Remus' slack face, a razor-thin crescent of satisfied malice, before breezing from the infirmary like a shadow driven on the wind.

* * *

 

Lily awoke, squinting, in the crimson-tinted darkness of her four-poster to a confused jumble of sound. The hangings were blotted from the outside with daylight, and she could hear the voices of her roommates, Felicity, Mary, Cordelia. As soon as she thought, _God, they're noisy,_ she remembered they had always been; they'd caused a racket every morning, always waking her up. She had never needed an alarm clock with the three of them blazing down their morning road to beauty.

She rolled over in bed and rubbed her eyes. How did she feel?

 _Fine_.

It seemed like a long time since she'd felt fine. Not since New Years. It was now... January tenth. For _ten days_ she'd languished under that curse, sinking deeper into its coldness—

The book from yesterday had said the curse would have killed her, if Sev hadn't broken it.

Sev...

The memory of last night suddenly hit her in a wave, cold and powerful and clear. Severus had healed her from a curse that had been draining her life away, and she'd run off and left him. Then he'd written her a note saying everything was fine, and she'd just let that be the end of it, just finished her bath and fallen into bed in a fog.

And somehow, in the fresh light of morning, with the sounds of Mary and Cordelia laughing and Felicity murmuring spells to curl her eyelashes, the selfish idiocy she'd perpetrated last night was suddenly and painfully obvious. It was so obvious she couldn't see how she'd missed it; how she'd _done_ that.

Oh God, she had to find him. He _said_ he was all right—and maybe he'd been able to heal himself well enough—but he couldn't be _all right_ all right. She'd run off and _left_ _him_. Even after all her curse-inspired protestations of—her stomach churned with sickened guilt—of _love_ , even though he hadn't believed them for a second, it was another thing to actually have your best friend just run off and ditch you after you'd saved her life. How could she just have let that note be the end of it, last night?

There was something _wrong_ with her, there had to be. . .

She sat up and wrenched her hangings open, kicking her legs free of her blankets. She vaulted out of bed and scrambled to her trunk, to haul out her robes. Ugh, school robes; they were so _itchy_...

It wasn't until she turned around that she realized the dorm had fallen as silent as if the whole room had been hit with a silencing spell. She blinked at the others, all of whom had frozen in various states of early morning primping—well, except Felicity Meadowes, who continued to fasten her eagle-feather earrings with an expression of serene indifference.

"What?" Lily asked, bewildered, looking from Mary to Cordelia.

Mary's and Cordelia's eyes flashed toward each other like a pair of magnets. Laying down her hairbrush, Cordelia forced an expression on her face that was probably supposed to be a smile; Mary pivoted to face her mirror and started resolutely painting her lips.

"Good morning, Lily," Cordelia said. She had the same forced cheer in her voice and on her face. "How—how are you feeling?"

 _Oh._ Lily tried not to blush. Yesterday, she'd been so out of it. Hadn't she pulled her wand on Mary for calling Sev a filthy Death Eater? The memory burned with the twin sensations of shame and anger that even now felt justified.

"Fine," she said honestly. Cordelia's painful-looking smile didn't ease, and Mary's hardened eyes were watching her over her shoulder in the mirror. "I feel fine," Lily said, raising her voice a tad. "Really. Nothing's wrong with me anymore. They fixed me."

"Are you _sure_?" Felicity murmured. Lily wasn't sure whether to glare or ignore this. She decided to ignore it. Surely that was more grown-up. More grown-up than Felicity, anyway.

"Positive," she said shortly. She tugged her nightgown off and busied herself with fastening bras and pulling on socks. The other girls started shuffling around again, but now Mary and Cordelia were whispering. Lily tried to ignore them, too. She had enough to worry about. Especially since—God, was that her _hair_? Ugh.

The other girls left without waiting for her, although Cordelia offered a timid "See you at breakfast." Lily faked a smile, but she figured it didn't deserve the name any more than Cordelia's had.

She took another look at her hair and just gave up. It wouldn't go any measure toward making anyone think she was really _fine_ in the way she was surely going to have to claim to be a hundred times today, but she couldn't be bothered to fuss with it. She needed to see Severus, and he wasn't going to give a damn about her hair.

She snatched up her school bag and was halfway down the dormitory stairs when the warning klaxon suddenly went off, shrieking, and the stairs slammed into one seamless run, forming themselves into a slide. With a yelp she her backside collided with the stone; she careened down the last three flights down to the common room, where she crashed into—and here was the big surprise—

James.

She felt as if someone had Vanished all her organs.

This was the first time she was seeing him—hearing him; seeing or hearing _any_ of them—without the screen of the curse to make her not care. She could hear Sirius roaring with laughter somewhere close by; other people were laughing and someone close by was squeaking; but her mind and heart were filled with so many emotions, so quickly—it was like footage she'd seen on the telly of a tsunami, when the ocean rolled over houses and cars and smashed everything apart, churning the detritus as it swept along its inexorable course.

Somehow the strap of her bag had got looped around James's neck. She _needed_ this extraneous detail. She would focus on it as if her sanity depended on it. It probably did, the way it had when she'd awakened in her bedroom back home in Cokeworth, her ears empty of Harry's cries, and thought, _I need to brush my teeth_. _I'm in my pajamas, and I need to brush my teeth._

Right now, she needed to get her bag off James' neck.

"Evans?" he gasped, but whether that was from her yanking a little too hard on the strap or from the shock of seeing her like this, after what she must have seemed yesterday, Lily couldn't say. "Are you all right?"

Something like a mackerel had lodged in her throat. She nodded; they both pulled on the strap and knocked his glasses off. When he bent to snatch them up, she saw Sirius lazing about in one of the red arm-chairs next to the fire, a huge, moldering book in his lap. Her head spun. _Sirius_ with a _book_?

Maybe she really was going crazy.

The need to get away from everyone was like the itch of a mosquito bite, prickling beneath her skin: _getawaygetawaygetaway_. She started to thrust through the crowd toward the portrait hole, and then almost started out of her skin when James' hand clamped on her arm.

"Evans?" he asked, worry creasing his face, his eyebrows above his spectacles; and the last thing she'd heard him say was, _Lily, it's him! Take Harry and go—_

She burst into tears.

" _James_! What did you do to her?" she heard a girl's voice warble.

"Nothing!" James said, panicked. "Evans, what is it? What's wrong—"

"Prongs"—Sirius's voice; her vision was splintered with tears, but she could practically hear the eye-roll—"when a bird's crying in front of you, you're supposed to do something comforting."

James patted her on the shoulder. Lily wailed and buried her face in her hands. Some female voice was making soothing shushing noises in her ear.

"You are so goddamn useless, mate," Sirius said. She heard him getting up and felt him come near. Then, of all things, he slung his arm around her shoulders and rubbed her arm. The move shocked her into raising her face out of her hands.

"Like _this_ ," he said, and then pushed her at James, so that they both stumbled and James grabbed her out of reflex.

"Padfoot!"

Lily, her nose pressed uncomfortably into James' scratchy school tie, didn't smell James' cologne. He must not have worn any at this age. In fact, nothing about him smelled familiar—Hogwarts-familiar, but not _James_ -familiar; not like pureed carrots or baby-food plums or that sapphire cologne he'd splash on too much of every morning, or the brand of Muggle toothpaste she stocked in the bathroom. Now, he just smelled like school soap and wool.

Oddly, it allowed her to collect herself. She wiped her eyes and stood up straight, wiped her eyes some more, and tried to pull the snot back into her nose. Someone handed her a handkerchief. She started to say, "Thanks," and then saw whose hand the handkerchief was attached to.

It was Peter. He even looked concerned. At the sudden expression on her face, his concern changed to pink-cheeked bewilderment; he stammered, "A-all right, Evans?"

"I—" James and Peter were staring at her, along with every single person in the common room. Was that a Hufflepuff over by the ficus?

"I have to go," she gasped. She pivoted for the portrait hole; Sirius stepped nimbly aside, and she slammed out of the room, almost knocking the Fat Lady out of her frame.

"Be careful!" the Fat Lady squealed; Lily gasped, "Sorry"—she stumbled, almost tripping on her bag that had caught on her shoulder—

"Evans! Wait!"

Half of her wanted to turn around and throw herself on him, but the other half wanted to keep running. Curse residue, the pain of not knowing what to _do_ , the pain of being the only one who understood how much this _hurt_ —

No. Severus understood. Severus. . .

Her eyes widened. She was supposed to be finding Severus! Shit!

James' hand clamped on her arm, and then let go like he'd grabbed a live wire. "Sorry!" he said. "I just—Evans, will you turn around. Please?"

Lily took a few deep breaths and then turned. She tried to make her face stony, but the sight of his hair, with the cowlick that had always winged down over his right eye, made her want to burst into tears again. A few drops gummed onto her sticky eyelashes. Thank God she hadn't stopped to put on any makeup.

"I'm sorry," she croaked, "but I have a—meeting I have to get to." What the hell? What was she, a CEO?

"A meeting with who?" he asked swiftly. "I can walk you there, I know loads of shortcuts. We can talk on the way."

"N-no." Nononono. She wasn't looking for Severus with James in tow, for a _thousand_ reasons. "Thanks, but I'll just—I need to go by myself, all right? I'll probably miss breakfast, so—"

"I can show you a way into the kitchens," he offered, lighting with hope and ideas.

"Big painting of the fruit, tickle the pear," she said thickly. "I know."

For a moment James looked thrown, but then a weird light stole into his eye. Lily realized he was _impressed._ For some reason, this felt like a disaster—

"Yeah," he said, "it is. I didn't know you snuck into the kitchens ever, Evans. I thought we'd've seen you."

It wasn't an interrogation, but she said, "I haven't. I overheard you lot talking about it. Look. . . I'm sorry," she said, fake-checking her watch, "but I really do need to be—"

"Right, right." Before she could stop him, he took her bag from her shoulder. She twitched. "Shouldn't have to carry this old thing. So, where we going? McGonagall? Pomfrey? You look loads better, Evans, but I'm still not all convinced you're _better_ better. You'd better—"

"Please stop saying better," she said desperately. "James, _really,_ this is something I need to do on my own, so if you'll just give me back my bag, please—"

She held out her hand, which was shaking, but her bag stayed on his shoulder.

"Why alone?" he asked, honestly curious. Then his eyes narrowed. "Wait. . . alone. . . this is Snape's doing, isn't it?"

She could feel her chin coming up. "What's _Severus's_ doing?"

"That curse you were under, for one," said James, without missing a beat.

Lily stiffened all over, like she'd been hit with a hex that turned the body to stone. She narrowed her eyes back at him; he blinked, but he didn't back down.

"Let's get one thing straight, James, thank you," she said tighly. "I was cursed, yes. But it was _not_ Severus who did it, and I am _fine_ now, and if you—go _after_ him as some kind of punishment for cursing me, I will land you in detention for the rest of the _term_ before you can say 'Mischief Managed.' Am I being plain enough?"

James' eyes only narrowed further behind his glasses. "Then who cursed you?" he asked aggressively.

"My money's on Lucius Malfoy." She pulled her bag off his shoulder and looped the strap over her head, wondering if she should even have said that, and feeling a cramp of doubt when James's eyes went huge again and the color vanished from his face. "Now, I really am in a hurry, so if you'll excuse me—"

"When would you have got near Lucius Malfoy?" James demanded. I'll bet it was because of Snape—"

"For God's sake!" The urge to hit him with her bag surged. She settled for stomping her foot, feeling, as she did so, every bit of sixteen-years-old. "Other people exist, you know! Other people do bad things besides Severus!"

"So you'll admit he does bad things!" James interrupted, like Counter or Clockwise pouncing on a mouse. Or Filch on a troublemaking student.

"So do you," she said coldly. "I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear, but teenaged boys are _frequently_ ill-behaved."

"I don't do Dark magic," James said hotly. "I never called you a—what he called you. How can you go around defending—"

"Severus and I have come to an understanding," she grit out. "Now seriously, James—"

"What kind of understanding?" he demanded.

"The kind where it's none of James Potter's business, _or_ Sirius Black's, or, _shockingly_ , anyone's but Severus's and mine. Now get out of it, James, before I make you!" And she nipped past him and darted down the stairs. Her memory flashed back to last night, charging down the vault of staircases— _leaping into Sev's arms_ —but James didn't run after her. Thank God for small mercies. The urge to cry surged up again.

_I need to find Sev—he'll make it better—_

She stopped at the bottom of the flight, but then forced herself to keep going in case James was still watching her—or worse, planning to follow her. The Map—and the cloak! He could follow her easily; as easily as he could think of something bad to say about, or do to, Severus. In fact, she was, surprised he hadn't tried to follow her last night... unless Sev had somehow ensured he hadn't...

Sev. She walked blindly along the corridor, her hand fisted over her heart. He'd broken the curse, hadn't he? And yet she still felt this powerful urge to find him, with a twin certainty that once she did, everything would seem different—better, more palliative...

_But it was like that before you were cursed, wasn't it? Since the moment you knew who he really was, you've been clinging to him._

She had. Hadn't she even thought, when laid up sick, that seeing present-James could wait because she _needed_ Severus, for the sake of her sanity? She'd have gone mad without him—she had even told him that. Separated from James and Harry...

But now James was here, and she still needed Severus to save her from utterly losing her mind. What was she supposed to _do_? How was she going to deal with James and Severus going at each other's throats? Being back here was plunging her into memories filled with them doing just that. It hadn't been until seventh year that James had quit hexing Severus any time they were within striking distance of each other. Severus had kept it up then, still, but she could at least count on this Severus to be . . . not more temperate, but more _controlled_. The mania would be more one-sided, but it looked like the remaining side was going to be even _worse_ . . .

Groaning, she thudded her forehead against the nearest wall.

"Ow," she muttered.

She groped in her pocket for Sev's note from last night. Deciding she might as well try—she didn't have James's miraculous map—she pulled a quill from her bag and wrote on the parchment _Where are you?_

She heard students clattering on the stairs down the corridor behind her, headed to breakfast, and started walking away from them, checking the paper as she went. At first she thought there would be no reply, either because it didn't work that way or because of... something worse... or that he didn't want to talk to her—when Sev's handwriting started melting onto the page, one letter at a time, as if she were watching him write it.

_East wing, the turret, seventh floor. Through the disused corridor. You'll have to get the doors open._

_Disused corridor?_ she wrote back. _I'm sorry, I don't know the school as well as you._

_Where are you currently?_

_Two floors down from Gryffindor tower._

Nothing else appeared. For a moment she wondered if she was going to come and get her, but then, in the watery daylight painting the corridor she saw dark lines shining through the parchment from the other side. She turned it over and saw—a map. He was drawing her a little map. A smile curved over her face, the first real one for a long time, it felt like.

As she followed Sev's map, the castle washed clean through her memory, reminding her of scents, sensations, thoughts she'd long forgotten. She had come back here during the War, but only to see Dumbledore; she had always used the Floo and spent her time in the safe circle of his office. She had always thought of Dumbledore's office being like a brain-space to Hogwarts, and she hadn't walked through its heart since she was really eighteen.

On her last day before graduating, she had gone on a walk much like this. The halls had been filled with molten shafts of sunlight, and they'd been emptied, mostly, as students spent their time outside in the flush of summer. She had been thinking about going home, and how _this_ was her home, and how the world outside was turning darker and darker and she didn't know what to do. Once she left Hogwarts, the scaffolding of her life would have been dismantled and removed.

The disused corridor was filled with the scent of dust and neglect. She passed through a film of magic that made the ends of her hair curl and her skin tingle as if exposed to the first glow of spring sunlight, and left her footprints in the dust. Opening the door at the other end, she found herself in a hollow turret, with a thin line of steps spiraling up into its light-filled peaks. She climbed them, about three flights, making sure to match Severus's map, and stepped off into a hall that was patently unfamiliar. It was very short, only a few paces deep... and where Severus indicated a doorway, there was only a blank wall.

She put her hand out, but encountered only smooth, dusty stone. Not a door pretending to be a wall, then. Had she got lost?

"Sev?" she called. She almost jumped out of her skin when his hand emerged from the wall and grabbed her wrist. She did say, "Shit!"

The paper now read _Walk through._ She twisted her wrist to lace their fingers together—his hand twitched—and then he pulled her forward. She shut her eyes as she passed through the stone, but the sensation that traveled across her skin was only cool and prickly.

When she opened her eyes, she was looking up at Sev. It struck her that he wasn't very much taller than she was; only a few inches. He looked exhausted. His hair was a net of oily strings, the bones around his eyes looked sunken with shadows, and there was an unhealthy pallor to his skin, into which his lips almost blended, completely bloodless. But his eyes were glittering, the way they did when he was in the field of some emotion she didn't understand.

"Sev..." she whispered, horrified, because he looked so _ill_. She gripped his hand harder, and raised the other to touch his face, but he flinched back as if her last touch had been a slap. She _saw_ the moment his rigid control slammed into place.

Tears flooded her eyes so fast they stung. "Sev, what did I do to you?" she whispered. "How could you tell me you're all right, you look—"

"I've been worse." His voice was hoarse, and he didn't move closer to her, but stayed exactly where he'd moved when he flinched. "Let's not discuss it here. There." He jerked his head toward a doorway she hadn't noticed, because she'd been too busy with this specter of Severus.

The doorway was several meters above their head.

"How are we...?"

"Walking. Don't look down."

Of course, since he said that, she did—and as he must've known it would, the sight made her shriek and grab him round the waist. "Sev, where's the _floor_?" She knew they were standing on something because she could feel the solidness beneath her shoe soles, but all she could _see_ was a long, long drop down into nothing. "Oh God—"

"Are you a Gryffindor or aren't you?" he asked. She felt him tense in the circle of her clutching arms, every line of him rigid as iron. She knew she ought to let go, to make him more comfortable, but she couldn't. She looked up into his face, from much closer to him than she usually stood, and remembered looking at him across the frozen grass last night. And like that moment, she felt as if something connected, as she looked him in the eye... but she felt no rush of memories signaling the pulse of Leglimency; it was only a look, which must mean Severus was Occluding.

"I think some qualities are selective," she said. "Apparently I didn't get the 'walks blithely over invisible floors' bit of Gryffindor."

"Perhaps it's a Slytherin trait after all." He cast some sort of charm at the air beneath their feet that made a walkway and a set of steps glow golden out of thin air. "Can you walk across that without fainting?"

"Can I be a big baby and keep hold of your hand, at least?"

She thought she saw a change, somewhere in his eyes, some almost infinitesimal shift, but as soon as she thought it, she wasn't sure. Whatever it was, it had gone.

"I'm not going to let you fall, Lily," he said flatly.

"I know. That's why I want to hold on." She squeezed his hand.

Something flickered in his face, like nothing more than a muscle going awry; then he turned away from her, hunching his shoulders, and led her up the glowing steps. At the top, he dispelled the charm, dissipating the glowing lines of the stairs back into nothingness, and nudged her into a little alcove of the room where a floor-length opening in the stone composed a medieval window, free of glass. Severus had made himself a space in there, with a pallet on the floor and a stack of books, and a jar of—

"Are those my stars?" she asked curiously.

She'd never seen anyone act so fast. The jar was just suddenly _gone_. She realized Severus had Summoned it and was shoving it into a pocket of his robes. He was white with anger.

"I kept them," he gritted out.

Lily had no idea what to say or do. She wanted to touch him, but she was afraid he might—explode or something. So she stepped up to the window instead and looked down on the silvered loch, the dark verdancy of the surrounding hills blanketed with fallen snow, the castle's peaks flecked with ice. Everything shades of whiteness, darkness, grayness. A world without color, cold and harsh and brutal in its beauty.

"Severus," she said, watching the three syllables of his name mist in the morning air, "it's freezing up here."

"It was fine sleeping with the stars." He thrust them back at her. "Keep them, then, if you're cold."

She shook her head. "I can make more." To demonstrate, she withdrew her wand and cast them, conjuring a jar and guiding them inside. "I'll leave these with you... if this is where you're staying?"

"The Slytherin dorms aren't safe," he said, sounding both bored and curt.

"What?" she asked, turning back toward him. "Aren't _safe_? What d'you mean?" A dark certainty began to yawn inside her. "Is this—oh God, is this about you missing the meeting with You-Know-Who?"

"It's about Slytherin being the House of opportunity," Severus said flatly. "It needn't trouble you."

"Right," Lily said, her shallow breath forming in clouds of mist in front of her. "No, you're right—I don't need to worry about you sleeping like a homeless person because it's not safe to sleep in your _dorm_. I don't need to worry about the whole _House_ being after you because of something I asked you to do. Why would I worry about that?"

"I don't know," he asked, his voice suddenly as cold and jagged as the broken ice on the rooftops below. "Why _would_ you? You have a remarkable track record of washing your hands of me when things grow rocky; I naturally assumed these circumstances would be no different."

Lily felt all the blood and warmth drain from her face. In fact, she had no idea where they went; her entire body seemed emptied of both, leaving her hollow and cold. She couldn't even speak. The sight of Severus' face, for a split second open, raw, and cruel, imprinted on her mind; and even when he turned away, hunching in on himself, she could still see it.

"I apologize," he said with brutal harshness. "Forget I said that. I—am not—just forget it."

"Right," Lily said numbly. "I'll just forget it. Like I'll not worry. Sev..." When he flinched, so did she. "I—about last night—I'm so, _so_ sorry—I didn't mean to just run off like that, I wish I hadn't, it was so—it was cruel, I'm really sorry, I—"

"I told you that you would," he said without turning around. "It doesn't matter."

"Yes it does! Look—Sev—you don't need to _pretend_ with me."

He still didn't turn around, and he didn't say anything. She even thought he stopped breathing for a moment.

"You should go," he said at last, his voice so thin, she thought it might come apart in the air. "Try to find normalcy again. It will put everyone's mind at ease."

Lily's shoulders slumped. She wasn't getting anything more out of him, not now, not when he was in this state. She would have to bear it out and try again later.

"All right," she said dully. "Let's go, then..." She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder, to have something to do with her hands.

"I said 'you,' not 'we.'"

"Wh—you're staying up here? Sev, it's freezing!"

She should really shut up, she thought; every attempt she made to convince him that she cared about his well-being only seemed to enrage him. "I am a grown man, Lily," he snarled. "I have said I will be remaining up here, and that is what I will do."

"Well, then, maybe I should stay." She tried to make her voice even and nice, but it came out sort of low and dangerous.

"Or maybe you should do as I ask and leave me be. You're well again; go play with the Marauders, before they blow up the school on their quest to _save_ you."

A thin film of hatred had laid itself over his face, like a layer of ice across a pond. Lily wanted to tear at her hair—but she gripped her frustration and forced it down. Severus was hurt. She'd hurt him last night—again—after she'd sworn she'd never do that again. The least she could do, after putting that look on his face, was let him hate.

The least. . .

"All right," she said. "I'll go." This didn't make him look less or more hate-filled. "But I'm only going so you don't jump out the window to get away from me."

A thought occurred to her; she turned back to the window and looked out, memorizing the turret's position. She didn't trust Severus not to ward his space against her, but maybe she could fly in, or at least get onto the roof and yell down at him.

"What are you doing?" he asked her coldly.

"It's a nice view," she said with pretend innocence. "I just wanted one more peek."

"You're planning something," he said even more coldly. "And with nothing remotely approaching subtlety. If you're thinking of flying in, I've already taken care of that. I remember your _husband's_ ," his lip curled over teeth that were actually clenched together, "forte. _All_ of them—the Quidditch, the glory-mongering, the infantile pranking, the... no, forgive me, those are the only ones I can recall."

"Sev..." she started, trying to keep an iron control on her voice. It warbled anyway.

" _Were_ there others?"

"I'm going now," she said, her even voice shaking, her fist rigid on her bag's strap. "I'll come by later and see how you're doing."

She forced herself to walk calmly past him. At the doorway, she gazed down the long, empty drop to the shadows far below, so thick they obscured the ground floor—wherever that was. Taking a deep breath, she stared straight ahead and slid her foot out onto the platform she knew, intellectually, was there..

A glittering light on the edge of her vision made her glance down. Severus had made the stairs glow again, so she could see where she was stepping.

Her heart lodged in her throat. She turned quickly back toward him, but he stood against the window, his back turned toward her, his posture rigid and almost... miserable.

"Thanks," she said anyway, her voice quavering. But he didn't turn.

She descended the glowing stairs and then the tower itself, her heart beating hard and dry in her throat all the way. This, she thought, _this_ was what she hated about Dark magic. It might not be evil; it might not even be responsible for evil; but even if you could resist its spells driving you mad, when it all was over you were still left picking up the scraps of your heart and trying to piece them back together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Idea credit* The idea of Severus calling the authorities on the Marauders for their illicit full-moon activities came from duj. I modified it a bit from your original suggestion, but I certainly wouldn't have thought of any of it. Thank you!


	18. Chapter 18

Remus pulled on his school clothes in a mood of bitter lamentation. He dealt himself a series of sharp mental kicks at his own stupidity for supposing that everything would be hunky-dory once he got his sight back. Snape had given him sight—and self-knowledge—and, on top of the remorse and self-disgust that self-knowledge brought, a whole heap of new worries to look at.

Remus put his self-excoriation on hold for a moment to wonder why the hell that wily Slytherin bastard had bothered exacting that promise from him in the first place. Had it just been for a kind of malicious verisimilitude? He must've intended all along to get the others expelled; but he maybe he'd wanted Remus to start feeling the loss of their society on full moon nights, to prepare for it first as it related only to himself, before Snape added, Oh yeah, And I'm Getting Them Thrown Out Of School Anywise, So. As far as pulling the rug from under Remus' feet and banging his head on the coffee table went, it was a masterstroke.

In all fairness, he knew that in spite of that bitch move, Snape's assessment of their monthly activities wasn't _wrong_. Remus remembered his mum telling him something once about Muggle law: how if you kept a tiger in your backyard and someone wandered into its cage and the tiger ate them, you were legally culpable. Some kind of negligence, wasn't it? Because you hadn't put strong enough protections on your yard. Because you were dumb enough to think you could cage a tiger in the first place.

As he pulled on a sock, Remus felt a pang of surprise at Dumbledore's not moving his hiding place after it became obvious that Snape knew about it. He _had_ given it more protections . . . but they'd never been something that a rat-who-was-really-a-wizard, coming at them from the right direction, couldn't overcome . . . they'd been enough to keep a werewolf in and students out, and the adults had assumed that would be enough . . .

Remus dug his fingers into his hair, dropping his head and digging his elbows into his knees. His stomach churned.

He wasn't sure if he could feel worse if they'd _meant_ to hurt someone.

He still didn't know why Snape would care, unless this was just part of his revenge. He hadn't been able to tell anyone that Remus was a werewolf that had nearly bitten him, not without getting himself expelled in the process; but a year later, he was able to orchestrate something near as good. Violation of the Decree for Underage Wizardry, in the particular guise of three illegal Animagi, could lead to a definite shitstorm . . . and then Remus would be without his best friends, the ones who kept him sane, not just on full moon nights . . .

For all Snape claimed about Remus' punishment not serving up the right amount of satisfaction, he'd sure managed to avenge himself on all four of them pretty fairly. What a _pièce de résistance_.

Honestly, Remus wouldn't have thought Snape was _this_ crafty. He may have been capable of intricate plots, but his past revenge schemes had always fallen apart in the third or fourth act when his temper got the better of him. But the cold-bloodedness of this scheme echoed with the voice of _control_.

Remus didn't know what to do. He couldn't tell anyone without getting someone in horrible trouble. Telling James or Sirius would lead to something sickening befalling Snape; telling a teacher would be as bad as telling the authorities. Even telling Dumbledore would probably get everyone in a load of trouble. Remus wasn't clever enough to forestall what Snape had done on his own. He didn't even know what might happen to James and Sirius and Peter if . . .

The library. Of _course_. He didn't know what could happen to underage Animagi, but he could find out. He knew there was an Animagus registry in the library, and McGonagall had been emphatic about penalties being followed through with. They had just never _worried_ about what those penalties were. Because they were too clever to get caught.

He paused to bathe in a fresh wave of self-loathing, and then checked his watch. Twenty minutes till his first class. If he ran, he just might make it.

He jumped to his feet, grabbed his bag, and dashed for the doors. "Thank you!" he blurted to Madam Pomfrey as he streaked past her, where she stood refilling vials of Skele-gro with toxic green goop. "See you later!"

He pelted out of the library and careened around the corner, where he slammed headlong into an innocent pedestrian who, from the feel of things, had been clipping at a brisk pace from the opposite direction. They connected with the floor gracelessly, and its stone had no yielding sympathy. Remus' vision was spotty and doubled; he wanted to lie there dazed for a few moments, but he owed the other person more than clutching his own head and moaning. He gasped, "Sorry—sorry—"

"Remus?" said a bewildered female voice.

Remus screwed his eyes back into their sockets and blinked. Lily was also blinking stars away, trying to sit up in the tangled jumble of their school robes and bags. She still looked pale, like a flu convalescent, but loads better than she had the last time he'd—well—seen her. Pomfrey had said she'd healed, but trounced all Remus's concerned questions with a firm: "I don't discuss the particulars of my patients' recovery with anyone, Mr Lupin. Now lie still and let me concentrate."

"Well, at least it answers my question if you're up again," Lily said, rubbing her forehead. "You were, at least."

"Sorry!" He disentangled himself, winced, and helped her up, wincing further. Her winces were equally expressive. _Way to be a guffin, Remus, careening around and knocking over sick girls._ "I was headed for the library."

"I didn't know anyone could miss books that much after being unable to read for half a day."

It was a very Lily-like remark, but the customary smile that went with it looked—well, "mechanical" would have been generous. Her expression wouldn't have been out of place in a Cubist gallery.

"Did I hurt you?" Remus asked, concerned. "I mean, obviously I did, but—how much?"

"Oh, I've been knocked around worse." She rubbed her hip. "Even this morning. J—" Her expression prickled with a sudden tension. "Potter thought it'd give me a laugh if he turned the girl's staircase into a slide while I was on it."

Remus sighed. "I'm sorry."

"Oh Remus, you aren't responsible for him. Besides, he didn't really do it for a laugh—he was actually trying to get up to see I was all right and forgot."

"Be friends with James and Sirius long enough, and you'll get in the habit of apologizing to everyone they've talked to," he said. "I'm sorry I gave you bruises on top of your bruises."

"Well." Her smile was paler, like a shadow on a cloudy day, but more genuine than the Cubist impersonation. "Lucky we're in sight of the infirmary. I'm keeping you from your passionate reunion with the library, aren't I?"

He shrugged. "It'll still be there later."

"You didn't really miss books that much, did you?"

"I had homework for McGonagall," he improvised. Then, thinking of Snape's bit about the close conjunction of lies and the truth, which was pretty damned ironic, all things considered, he added, "Sirius was supposed to bring it, but he and James were languishing in detention last night."

Lily didn't look remotely surprised. "I think McGonagall will give you a pass for being blind. Especially since she knows what your mates are like."

"I don't like to test it," Remus said. "If I were dead, maybe."

He got the shadow smile again. "Well, if you'd like, we can go to Transfigurations together later and I'll be your alibi. McGonagall is Head of Gryffindor; she ought to appreciate you were gallant enough not to leave me groaning on the floor to make your homework in time."

"All right," Remus agreed. "I'll take you up on that later. I can at least hide behind you if she gives us the gorgon's eye."

Lily's laugh had a garroted sound. "What price Gryffindor gallantry?"

"It's worth just enough to get rid of this bit of dust on your shoulder." He dashed it off. Then they shouldered their bags, grimaced once apiece at their twanging muscles, and set off for the Charms corridor.

"I'm glad to see you're able to see again," Lily said. She walked with her arms crossed and her shoulders a bit hunched, as though trying to be inconspicuous. "I guess Madam Pomfrey performed an eleventh-hour save?"

"It . . . wasn't her, actually." He wondered if he should tell her. Perhaps this was the real reason Snape had healed his eyes: to improve his standing with Lily. It would've made more sense if he'd done it two terms ago, when she wasn't speaking to him; she already seemed to like him again. Besides, if Snape had figured out that curing people of Dark magic was more likely to impress Lily than hexing people with it, then he'd really come a long way, revenge-expulsion plots notwithstanding.

Lily was waving her hand in front of Remus' face. "Are you sure you're all right?" she asked. It occurred to Remus that she looked almost as tired as Snape had. Not _exactly_ as tired, but then, Remus would bet most corpses didn't look as tired as Snape. Was that why she seemed so upset and distracted, because Snape looked so how-is-this-guy-still-standing-upright? Maybe she was afraid he'd keel over and stop breathing.

"I'm fine, really," he promised. "It was . . . it was Snape who healed me. My eyes, I mean."

Lily's face was so blank, for a moment Remus wondered if her curse had been cured by amnesia. "Severus . . . healed you."

Remus only nodded, trying to study her shifting expressions without seeming too obvious about it.

"Severus _Snape_?"

"I didn't know there was anyone else alive named Severus," Remus said honestly.

"Probably not, I just— _when_?"

"This morning. He came into the hospital wing early, before dawn. I don't know what he'd been doing all night, but he looked half-dead—what?" Remus asked in alarm, because all of the color in Lily's face had just vanished as if slapped away.

Her throat worked. "He healed me," she croaked. "My curse. The one that made me—act all—you know."

" . . . Jesus." Remus was purely astonished. He might even have goggled. She looked so anguished, he felt compelled to say: "Is that what's happened, then? Snape's turned over a new leaf as a Healer?"

"What?" she said, anguish transfiguring to bewilderment. "'What's happened'? I don't understand."

"Well," Remus said, feeling a bit bewildered himself, "you know . . . with you being friends with him again. . . I'm not asking why," he said hastily when her eyebrows snapped together. "I mean, I'm not _demanding_ to know why—you know him better than anyone, I imagine, so if you've decided to—" Oh, this was going as badly as his tête-à-tête in Dumbledore's office. Her face was beginning to tauten. "Not that it's any of my business if you have. Or haven't. I just—people can't help being curious. You know. You being friends with Snape again is like—you going out with James would be. Publicity-wise, I mean."

At that, she put her hand over her eyes. "It is, isn't it," she said in a muffled voice he couldn't interpret. "You know. . . " She dropped her hand and said through grit teeth, "Why can't everyone just mind their own _bloody_ business?"

"Their lives are boring," Remus said apologetically.

Lily gargled a laugh. "I wish mine was a little _more_ boring right now."

Remus nodded silently. Wasn't there some curse about living in interesting times? His mum had mentioned it a time or two. Muggles—especially science-types like his mum—still thought of magic as being very literal stuff, but Remus wondered . . . some people he knew never seemed to have a moment where life just let them alone.

"Is that where Snape is, then?" he asked, slanting his eyes along his cheekbones to watch her. "Resting, I mean?"

Lily glanced away. "I hope so," she said quietly.

* * *

 

When Lily and Remus straggled into Charms, it suddenly hit Lily what she was doing. She was walking into a classroom full of people who made her want to cry when they smiled, and pretending to learn—she glanced at the chalkboard—Silencing Spells. Oh brother.

Maybe Severus had the right idea, in his tower. She shouldn't have let him throw her out. . . or maybe, she thought, remembering the look on his face and his grit teeth, it had been _wise_ to, if not what she _morally_ should have done. Instead of sitting through a lecture-and-practice section on Silencing Spells, maybe she should park herself outside of his concealed tower door and do. . . something. Something to _help._

Whatever that was.

She hadn't thought being back here would be such a combination of nerve-wracking and bloody tedious. . . and this was only an hour into the first morning when reality wasn't being skewed by some Dark curse. If she'd thought it had been awkward to be at home under her mother's rule, or at Severus's house under his mum's, then _this_ , with hundreds _more_ people asking her questions she couldn't answer, and expecting her to act in ways she either couldn't remember or didn't _want_ to, was—

"Evans."

James. Again.

Lily closed her eyes, summoned her depleted reserves, and opened the eyes again.

"James," she said, striving for neutral. His tie was already messy and his shirt untucked, and the first class of the morning hadn't even begun. She _would not cry_ because his stupid tie was messy.

"Sit with us?" he asked, the hope prominent in his face and voice. Unlike Severus, James never hid emotions. He'd have scoffed at the idea, thought it dishonest. James had never seen the need to hide anything. Severus thought hiding was necessary to survival.

"Evans?" James said, starting to sound worried.

Lily closed her eyes again for a second. "All right, yes. I'll sit—but," she said sharply when his expression soared with hope, "nothing about Severus. One word about Severus, and I'm out. Roger that?"

"Okay," said James—after a second's pause, but assured. "You got it, Evans."

Too bad he was more assured than Lily was.

She sat delicately in the cluster of desks they'd commandeered, next to Remus. Sirius glanced at her and grunted, then glanced away again; Pettigrew . . . Peter . . . didn't seem to know how to look, and neither did Lily, to tell the truth.

James parked himself on her other side. She had no idea how she felt about that, either. Her stomach seemed to be a mess of nerves, and they wouldn't send interpretable signals to her brain.

As class progressed, Lily noticed that Remus clearly had some turmoil of his own on his mind. He kept blanking out and staring at the wall, and accidentally producing tufts of fire and jets of wine from his wand, culminating in the flattening of Professor Flitwick about half an hour into the lesson.

"Admirable force, Mr Lupin," Flitwick said once he'd got back on his feet and wrung himself out. "But rather different from the Silencing Charm we're _supposed_ to be practicing."

"Sorry," Remus said, going as red as the tiny cloud of fire that belched from his wand-tip.

"Yes. . . " Flitwick anxiously straightened his hat, his eyes on Remus' wand. "Mr Potter, if you'll partner"—Lily cringed; James became electrified—"Mr Lupin." Lily exhaled; James' expression crashed. "Miss Evans, if you'll partner with Miss Meadowes. Remember, the charm is _Silencio_. Once again, Mr Lupin . . ."

Over the sound of Remus' toucan squawking as he set its tail on fire, Felicity murmured: "I bet I know what happened." She waited until Lily glanced warily at her before continuing with a satisfied glimmer in her eye: "Snape hexed you so that you had to shag him, but it was so horrific, it cracked the curse the minute it was over. Or maybe during—"

A spell-bang erupted from directly behind Lily, along with the acrid scent of smoke; Flitwick squeaked, "Mr Potter, do watch what you're doing!" Someone whooped, "Nice one, Potter! Can you do it on cue? You'd be a hit at weddings!"

First things first.

She Silenco'd Felicity. The other girl blinked, and then her eyes bore into Lily like a pair of bradawls.

"Sorry," Lily said, glaring back. "Guess I need to improve my aim. But—oops, I don't know the counter-spell, so I guess we'll just have to wait for Flitwick to put Remus' toucan out and undo you."

Lily turned around in her seat to face Professor Flitwick, who, like James and Remus, was covered from head to foot in what looked like smokestack residue. Peter was fanning the sooty air with a magazine, and Sirius was sitting on the sidelines, laughing heartily, with at least half the class backing him up.

"Professor Flitwick?" Lily raised her voice to be heard over the laugh-track. "I'm afraid I don't feel well."

Flitwick blinked at her, his eyes round and white in his sooty face.

"You do look a bit peaky, Miss Evans," he said. "Run along to Madam Pomfrey, then—but don't over exert yourself!"

Lily grabbed her books and papers and shoved them into her bag, swinging it onto her shoulder and striding for the door. She left Flitwick saying to James and Remus, "A nice _Scourgify_ should do the trick, boys—no, on second thought, you had better let me do it. . ."

She was half afraid Severus' map would have erased itself, but its dark lines still gleamed on the parchment where he'd drawn them. But while the map led her back to the disused tower, its cartographer wouldn't let her up to see him. She stood on the other side of the stone where he'd pulled her through and shouted, cajoled, wheedled, and threatened to throw herself down the stairs, without making him even shoot back a mocking _Yeah, right_.

She dealt the wall a salutary kick, and was standing on one leg and swearing a blue one to alleviate the sudden rush of sensation, when she heard Severus' voice say from _behind_ her:

"What's the wall ever done to you?"

She spun around—still on one leg—and dropped the abused foot as she staggered. "Where did you come from?" she gasped.

"Even Rapunzel would have had a bitch of a time of remaining stuck in a tower all day. Is there something you need?"

He looked, if possible, even more worn-down now than he had that morning. "Exhausted" would have been a kind adjective, but "ghastly" or "ghoulish" a more accurate one. His _face_ looked like boy's pushed harshly over the threshold into manhood, but something around his eyes was far older than the thirty-eight years the soul had endured.

She felt a sudden rush of timidity. "I just . . . wanted to see how you're doing."

"I'll live," he said, sounding exhausted and . . . distant. Still angry, then. She swallowed. She was used to Severus yelling gibberish and throwing things when he was angry, not shutting her out.

"See," she said, gripping her bag's strap for support, "that's what I'm afraid of, that you _won't_. Severus, you look three times worse right now than you did when I last saw you. If you look three times worse by the end of the day, I'm afraid you'll have keeled over. Would you go to Madam Pomfrey?"

"She can't give me anything for this. It's backlash, Lily." Perhaps in reply to the expression on her face, he sighed, his voice ragged, annoyed and exasperated. "You didn't think the performance of Dark cures had any less impact than Dark spells, did you? The most she'll be able to do is get me hauled to the Headmaster's office for questioning, which," he said, his voice altering as if struck by a sudden blizzard, "is a fate I'd prefer to avoid. I'm sure Potter and his pack"—now his voice dipped to arctic temperatures, like dark water frozen fathoms-deep beneath kilometers of ice—"have already registered their suspicions that it was I who cursed you."

"I. . ." Her head and heart spun in opposite directions. The horrid thing was, she could believe that. The curse had left her memory intact; she could remember James yelling, _What have you done to her, you bastard?_ Oh God—she could _kill_ Lucius Malfoy for doing this—

"I know it wasn't you," she said. "It was Lucius Malfoy, wasn't it? I'll go to Dumbledore and tell him—"

"You'll do no such thing," said Severus, in such a dark and authoritative voice she felt her vocal cords closing up on cue. "You are to avoid interacting with Dumbledore as much as possible. A tête-à-tête would be disastrous. We've already drawn too much attention to ourselves—perhaps too much even to maintain damage control. . ."

He stopped and pressed his fingers over his eyes. She saw his hand shake. The sight was more affecting than she'd have thought. _Sev's_ hands shaking?

God, she hated Dark magic. She thought she might hate it now more than she ever had done before.

"There has to be something I can do for you," she said helplessly. Her palms were sweating. She wanted to touch him, to reassure him; to reassure herself. She wanted to feel his heart beating, blood moving under his skin; he looked so cold, not just in temperature, but in heart. . . "Something I can get you."

He breathed for a few moments. Was it from the pain, or from resisting the urge to strangle her? "Not unless you have a steam room."

She blinked. "S. . . steam room? What, like a sauna?"

"It has helped in the past. Don't ask me why. I thought the cold might be a reasonable. . . but it hasn't been working."

"Have you eaten at all?"

He shrugged, which meant he hadn't. He'd always been weird about food. She remembered that he wouldn't eat when it was close to test-time, because he said digesting made him feel lethargic; he was fasting made him sharper. Didn't Buddhist monks do that? Some kind of transcendentalist thing?

"Fine." She held out her hand. "Come on."

He didn't even look at her hand, let alone take it. His expression, pulled tight across his pain, was worn-down and irritated. "Where the hell are you going to find a steam room? You can't let me into the Gryffindor girls' bath—"

"I can tell you're really sick because you haven't got it yet." She tapped the red-and-gold badge pinned to the front of her robes. "We're going to the Prefects' Bath."

* * *

 

When Sev said "steam bath," he wasn't being hyperbolic. He fogged the whole bathroom, and it easily possessed the square-footage of her entire house in Cokeworth, upstairs and down. Lily's skin was damp all over; her hair was curling up madly on the ends, and the air felt thick in her nose and throat. He'd shut himself in one of the shower stalls, leaving her to sit on a towel near the wall, her shoes and stockings stripped off, her outer robes shed, the sleeves of her blouse rolled up and her tie loosened.

"This _is_ a sauna," she called. Her voice sank into the grayish-white clouds and refracted off the walls.

"You don't need to stay in here if you're uncomfortable," he said, in a tone that translated to 'If you're going to yammer, bugger off and leave me alone.'

"Yes I do. What if someone comes by? I'll get in less trouble for skipping class to sauna in the Prefects' Bath than you will."

"You'll still get in trouble."

"I've survived worse," she said, not entirely joking.

Sev didn't reply. Lily rested her head against the cool tile of the wall and closed her eyes. She wanted to ask him a million questions—like what his motive was for healing Remus, and if that healing spell had made him feel worse, and how long he thought this double-backlash would last. She remembered the way she'd felt after lifting Contrapasso . . . confused, disorientated, half-blind, equilibrium dashed all to hell and pain sparking throughout her whole body . . . and that had been _low level_. . .

And. . . a memory percolated in her mind, stirring up bubbles of anxiety. . . what was it Sev had said about the feelings casting Contrapasso had invoked? (Or was that _healing_ Contrapasso that he'd meant?) He'd said Contrapasso aggravated remorse and caused feelings of intense fear in its victims, and implied the caster felt an echo of that. . . but did you feel any kind of echo from _healing_ a person cursed with Dark magic?

She wanted . . .

Somewhere off in the fog, the painting over the door scraped open.

Lily's eyes shot open. "Sev!" she whispered, wondering how much anyone at the door would be able to see. Her hand groped along the wall tiles, the condensation making her palm slippery. "Someone's coming—"

"What's this shit, d'you think?" a very familiar voice hissed from entrance-way, the worst possible voice she could have heard in this situation. Her heart jumped into her throat, waiting for the reply, because you never heard one without the other—

"Snape!" James called through the steam; and now Lily could see their darker forms blotted against the mist. She scrambled to her feet, fumbling her wand out of her pocket, into her condensation-slippery hand. "We know you're in here!"

Severus' voice sounded out of the shower stall behind Lily without a trace of exhaustion. "That must mean you've developed considerable powers of literacy," he said. "Followed your little map here, did you?"

Lily's heart was pounding like a herd of horses across an open plane. Oh God, someone was going to get cursed. She knew the five of them had hexed each other stupid for six full years, but only a few instances were standing out in her memory—Severus being dangled upside down after OWLs, him hexing James' nose off in seventh year— Maybe if she could Stupefy James and Sirius first, nobody would wind up with broken bones or blood—

Something Mrs Snape had said at St Mungo's streaked through her head. _Students are taught to solve their own problems. . ._

Lily summoned the memory of her mum saying " _Oh yes, sixteen and eighteen, all grown up,_ " and kissing Petunia's cheek with misted eyes, the fairy-lights on their tree tinting the tousled halo of her hair.

 _Expecto Patronum!_ she thought fiercely, and sent her doe rocketing through the far wall, toward Professor McGonagall's office, its blue-white silver, like a shooting star, scintillating in the steam and fog.

The shower curtain snicked aside and Severus appeared, fully dressed, his face stark white and his eyes glittering. She swallowed. A powerful urge rose in her to beg _Please don't kill them—_

She grabbed all the indignation she felt anywhere, deep inside, and shoved it into her voice. "If you two are here to act like morons," she said loudly, "you can bugger off right now!"

"Evans!" James barreled through the fog, stopping a few paces away from her, his face—well, kind of indecipherable, since it was half-covered by his glasses and they were fully covered in steam. He reached up to wipe the fog away with a finger on the inside of the lens. "We've come to save you—what's _with_ this bally steam?"

"You've come to save me from the steam?" Lily asked. "Thanks, but I had it taken care of."

"No!" James wiped at the other lens. "From—where's Snape? I thought I saw him right there—"

Lily blinked and darted a glance at the shower stall. It was empty. And she didn't see Sirius either . . .

Heart flickering in her throat, she said, "James, why would I need saving from Severus in the bloody Prefect's Bath? I brought him in here!"

"Why'd he want to come here in the first place?" James demanded. "It's not like he ever takes a ruddy bath—"

"Is that my cue to hex you?" Severus asked, his voice seeming to come from four or five directions at once. Lily's organs tried to jump out of their rightful places. "Juvenile, but you do have the emotional sophistication of a concussed five-year-old—"

"Laugh it up, Snape," James retorted, confidence shining from every pore. "We're onto you. We know what's going on."

"If you ever prove capable of the simplest cognitive functions, Potter, I'd almost sleep easier at night."

A piece of paper shot out of James' pocket, soaring off to his right, Lily's left, as if summoned. James pivoted, firing a jet of red light after it and spotting Lily's vision; and then from _her_ right, now _behind_ James, a Stunning Spell caught him in the back and he crashed to the tiles, wand clattering from his hand. She started to move forward, to check he hadn't bashed anything, when red-black spell-shot rocketed through the fog from her left, almost clocking her in the head; she ducked, slipped on the wet floor, and haphazardly flung up a Protego, but she missed; there was an actinic flash, a muffled thud deep in the steam, she couldn't see in which direction—

And then it was over, just like that.

"Severus?" she called. She rolled James onto his back—he'd cracked his glasses, but other than that he seemed all right; his pulse was steady. And where had Sirius. . . ?

Severus had never replied. She glanced up, twisting her head first to the left, and then to the right—and jumped. He had materialized out of the steam, silent as the mist, his expression one of frigid contempt.

There was blood running down his face, from a cut beneath his hair.

She gasped and jumped up, almost slipping again on the wet tiles.

"You're bleeding!" she said fretfully.

"Head wounds always look worse than they are. Shouldn't you know that?"

She fumbled her handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed at the blood. "This needs disinfectant. I guess you'll be going to Madam Pomfrey after all."

Severus looked annoyed. "I underestimated Black. Pretty stupid of me."

She was very aware of the lump of James at her feet. The wet, garish crimson of the blood looked even more alarming against the pallor of Severus' face.

"I thought you'd summoned it. The map, I mean."

"That's what I wanted him to think," he said contemptuously. "In fact, I banished it."

She crumpled the handkerchief as she remembered her doe. "Oh no!" she blurted. "I sent my Patronus to Professor McGonagall—in case they—"

"Then I should leave," Severus said, and turned to go without any warmth, not even a backwards glance—

No time to think about that. Even though, since taking off the curse, he was acting like he hated her—

 _What does 'No time to think about that' **mean** , brain? _She scrambled for her bag and the bits of clothes she'd taken off. "You go," she panted, "I've got all this crap—if I explain to her it was me, it'll be okay—"

"Think you can carry that off, do you?" he said, his lip curling. "You, the worst liar in all of Scotland?"

Her face burned. "Well, she'll have more sympathy for—"

The portrait clattered open. "What on earth?" said McGonagall's voice, jolting Lily's heart to a stop. " _Evanesco_."

The steam dissipated as if blasted by a desert sun. Lily was impressed—but as it left McGonagall staring at Lily trying to re-button her shirt, Severus bleeding down the side of his face, and Sirius and James unconscious lumps on the floor, she wished McGonagall were a little less adept with vanishing spells.

"What?" McGonagall stared. "Miss Evans, Mr Snape, what is this?"

"I can explain," Lily blurted. Next to her, Severus sighed.

"I think you had better, Miss Evans! For one thing, I was under the impression that all students should be in class at this hour, not dueling amidst clouds of steam in the Prefects' Bath—which is off-limits to three of the students present, I might add. "

Her expression wasn't all the way to forbidding, but it wasn't anywhere near encouraging, either. Lily's mind, which needed a helpful pack of lies to explain this farrago, blanked. But her self-preservation, perhaps hoping to live up to its name for once, took over and shoved into the slot the only thing it could:

"Severus is bleeding!" she gasped.

McGonagall had strode over to check first on James, who was closest, and then on Sirius, but at this news, she straightened up and shot a swift look at Sev. Then she blinked—perhaps because Snape looked like he'd endured a lot more than a cut on the temple. Like an avalanche in the Swiss Alps, for starters.

"Gracious Rowena." She stared. "Report directly to Madam Pomfrey, Mr Snape. If you've been suffering from the same ailment as Miss Evans, you ought to have seen her earlier."

Lily blinked. The same ailment as—her curse? Relief showered her. If they could keep the teachers believing that, then maybe there could be fewer Dark magic explanations—

"Miss Evans, if you'll escort Mr Snape to the infirmary," McGonagall said, her tone, posture and expression clearly stamped with I-will-brook-no-arguments-you-two sentiment. "I will take care of Mr Black and Mr Potter."

Severus strode out of the bathroom without a word. Lily blurted a "Thank-you-sorry," at McGonagall and pelted after him.

"You _are_ going to the infirmary, aren't you?" she asked as soon as she caught up. But then she had to keep jogging, because when the bloody hell had he learned to walk so fast? He wasn't even that tall.

"You can't heal small cuts?" Severus said without looking around. "I can, at least, if you never learned."

"No, I did, but—don't you need disinfectant?"

"Being a spell-wound, it's unlikely to have any bacterial infection."

"But—"

He cut her off ruthlessly. "Pomfrey will ask questions."

"And how many questions d'you think they'll ask if you don't show up in the infirmary at _all_? What if McGonagall asks—"

"I doubt McGonagall will care enough to do any such thing," he said coldly over his shoulder, still eating up the corridor in long strides.

"But—"

"And you'll forgive me, I hope, for not wishing to put myself in the tedious position of enduring more of Potter and Black's asinine antics."

Her stomach twisted. "But if they used the map to find you just now, can't they find you in that tower?"

His voice was suddenly infused with venom. "I've taken care of it."

"Sev—" She grabbed him by the arm and tried to tug him to a stop; his momentum skidded her forward a few steps, but then he did pull up. When he looked at her, however, his expression was unfathomable, cold and distant, like arctic waters seen from space satellites.

"I hate it," she said, her heart thumping in her ears. "You know that, right?"

For a long moment, he didn't answer. He only looked at her, and she felt very small.

"I didn't," he said coldly. "But I suppose I can take it as a given."

Then he detached himself from her hand and left without a backwards glance, leaving her too uncertain to follow.

* * *

 

Remus was all of a dither.

Of course, "all of a dither" made it sound funny. He didn't find any part of this funny. In fact, he would prefer to call it "harrowing" or "soul-affecting."

He recalled that his dad had once, during a time of severe mental trial, asked him why he was looking like a dying duck in a thunderstorm. Remus wasn't sure what appearance dying ducks took on, in the thick of thunderstorms or elsewhere, but as he looked in the mirror in the loo between classes, he thought he could have walked into a gathering of the poor sods with no questions asked.

His dying duck impression was partly the fault of the book he'd just pulled off the dusty library shelf, clumping the air with dust bunnies and making himself cough: _Animagi Through the Ages_. Here was a soul-harrowing text if there ever was one. Under the chapter _Penalties, Punishments, and Punitive Damages_ , Remus groaned to read the following:

"Thie Animagus Transformation is dangerus on manie levells. Anie Wizarde or Witche seking to asume thie form of an Animall must submit first a Request with thie Governing Bodes, in ordur to commense with Training; and everie stage of Study must be monitor'd therafter by a Mentor Animagus, haveing acheeved thie Finall Transformation, for a pereod of at leest Seven Yeers previous. Anie Wizarde or Witche, who curcumvents theese Restrictions, or who asists another Wizarde or Witche, to curcumvent theme, is lible to Punishment, to thie fulest extent of thie Law. Anie faelure to Regester the Animall forme, with thie appropreate Government, is lible to Punishment, to thie fulest extent of thie Law."

(At this point there was a footnote pointing out that keelhauling, the method in use in 1653, when the book was written, was no longer a legal means of punishment. Please refer to more recent statues, as laws are subject to change.)

But Remus had got the gist. James, Sirius, and Peter weren't breaking a single law—e.g. not registering their forms—they were also in violation of registering their intent to study; of doing the transformation on their own; and of assisting each other—probably not just in the transformations, but in breaking the law in general.

With a sense of fatalism, he wondered if Snape had read this book. Probably. Remus would even bet his hat that he'd quoted this passage in his "anonymous" tip-off.

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell the book what he thought of its morals, its character, and its spelling, when he suddenly became aware that other someones were on the other side of the stacks. Embarrassing to be caught talking to yourself, even if the eavesdropper couldn't see you.

But, the natural reaction to the sudden presence of a disembodied voice being to listen to it, Remus held his breath and strained his ears:

". . . can't find where the bleeding Mudblood-lover is when he's not in class."

Hang on. Remus recognized that voice . . . Avery? What was he doing in a library? The only one you routinely saw library-side was Mulciber, and that was so he could stalk girls in the stacks. Upper-class Slytherins got lesser housemates to do their homework for them. Remus had always figured this job fell to Snape. You always saw him scribbling away at something, at any rate.

Not so much anymore. . . now you just saw him walking around looking like a shabbily animated corpse.

"Can't hardly find him in class, for that matter," said might-be-Wilkes.

"We need to flush him out of hiding," now-it-was-Mulciber said softly.

"Well, got an easy way of doing that, don't we, gents?" said sounded-like-Rosier, in an easy, even voice.

"We do?" asked Avery.

"Yes, you thick bitch," said Rosier. "Use your rutting head for once."

"Don't think that'll do him any good," Wilkes sniggered. "Waste of time, you ask me."

"Evans," said Mulciber, even more softly. Remus almost dropped his book.

"Thank you, Mulciber. _Evans_ , Avery."

"What about her?" asked Avery.

"Merlin's saggy arse, Avery," said Rosier. "It's called _bait_. We get Evans where we want her, and we'll have Snape where we want him."

"Oh," said Avery, "I get it now."

"Yeah, after having it explained to you step-by-step, with colored drawings."

"But couldn't we just follow the stupid Mudblood to him?" asked Avery. "She's always around him, since getting back."

"Not a bad point, Ave," said Rosier, like one mildly amazed to hear his dog sit up straight and start reciting epic poems. "But we could follow her around all day without finding him. Better to corner her."

"More fun, too," Mulciber said softly.

"Right, Mulce," said Rosier lazily. "More fun, too."

This, Remus thought, was when you needed two trigger-happy best mates who could be counted on to take a flying leap at the chance to hex a batch of Slytherins into jelly. This was also, of course, the time when you were all alone in the library. Sirius told Remus he was the clever one, but what he really meant was that Remus was the one who didn't shudder at the sight of a book thicker than five pages. Sirius and James were the ones with all the brilliant ideas. They were also the ones who'd just push the bookshelf over on the bastards and then cheer and high-five each other.

Remus listened to the four Slytherins shuffling off. Of course they wouldn't talk about what they intended to _do_ with Lily, or where they were going to do it, or anything really helpful. Remus couldn't turn into a rat to follow them with maximum unobtrusiveness, and Snape had stolen their map. On the plus side, this meant that if he spent half the time poring over it, searching for Lily, that James did, searching for Snape, he ought to catch the creeps closing in on her position . . . but those creeps had never played _harmless_ preliminaries of cat-and-mouse.

Whatever was up with this new Snape, he'd got himself on the bad side of four boys who for years had talked openly of the great career opportunity that was the Death Eaters. . ..

Remus shoved the Animagus book onto the shelf and skimmed after them.


	19. Chapter 19

Lunch was as much of a disaster as the rest of the morning had been—as the rest of _all_ Lily's time had been, since her old life had vanished into the ether of Avada Kedavra—and she hadn't even stayed till the end of the meal.

In fact, she hadn't stayed for six full minutes. Upon walking into the Great Hall and skimming her eyes over the surging sea of shrill people who would ask so many questions she couldn't answer, she had piled some bacon onto slices of buttered bread and wrapped it in a napkin, with the intention of pulling a Severus and hiding from everyone.

Except she'd made the mistake of hoving alongside the bacon platter at the end of the table without noticing who was sitting there.

"Lily?"

Her eyes snapped over to Cordelia's concerned face. At least Cordelia wasn't aggressive or sarcastic, like Mary and Felicity—who were in fact sitting one to Lily's left, and one to her right. Great.

"Are you getting sick again?" Cordelia asked.

"No," Lily said, trying to smile. "I'm just—tired, that's all."

"You should sit and eat with us," Cordelia encouraged. "That can't be all you're eating for lunch, that little bacon sandwich—"

"Lose your appetite over your bitch move with the Silencing spell?" Felicity asked bluntly. Cordelia squeaked.

"Felicity! Language!"

"Why should I have?" Lily retorted. "I can tell by that ham hock on your plate that didn't lose yours with your bitch question that preceded."

" _Lily_! Language!"

"It's that Snape," Mary interrupted on Lily's left, her voice hard. "Lily, why are you hanging round him again? We thought you'd finally given up on that creep."

"Excuse me," Lily said in a very controlled voice. "I appreciate that you all worry about me, really, I do. But as far as the topic of Severus is concerned, you can piss off."

Now here she was, all alone on the wide open grounds that had frozen in the night with the thick snow that had fallen. She did have an excellent track record recently of driving all her friends to despise her. She knew she shouldn't have lost her temper with the girls—the last time they'd seen her, she'd been a different _person_ —but it would be easier to keep her head if they would stop being such fatheads.

_And I'm sure you never fed their prejudice in any way, with anything you ever said about him. . ._

The voice of her inner dementor moaned through her head like a blast of winter wind. She grimaced, but the argument she might once have raised didn't even bother to check in. What Severus had done recently now weighed more than what he'd done a long time ago. That was natural, wasn't it? The way she'd eventually seen past James' trigger-happy hex-pranking to the man beneath, who was so loyal to his friends and brave and determined. . .

Unfortunately, right now all that determination was focused on needling Severus. Because James was still fixated where Lily _had been_ , at this age, in 1977 the first time around: believing Severus embodied what was so twisted about Slytherin House, and that Slytherin embodied what was so twisted in the Wizarding world. . . that if you could just straighten out those Death Eaters in their Slytherin colors, the world would be all right again. . .

Stupid, stupid. . .

People could change. People _did_ change. Wasn't that once what she'd been so mad about, with Severus? The fact that he'd changed from that creative boy, so assured in his destiny, to the young man who'd used his creativity to master Dark spells to hurt people? And now Severus had changed again. . . well, he'd apparently been changing for a long time. She didn't think she'd ever met anyone who'd changed so much. But it stood to reason: he'd had a lifetime to change, and she was seeing the result of twenty-two years' worth of progress. She'd never seen twenty-two years of anything before. And Severus. . . he seemed to have lived and experienced things that some people three times his age hadn't done. Even knowing the boy and the young man, neither of whom had ever been quite like anyone else, this grown-up Severus was _so_ different she sometimes felt overwhelmed, as if she'd fallen down at the beach when a large wave washed over her, finding herself underwater for the first time and being pulled out on the tide.

The wind knifed over the hillside, clawing at her hair and diving inside her cloak. She shivered and tucked her arms tighter about herself. Honestly, bruised self-image aside, going for a stroll during January in Scotland was about as bright as . . . well, as she'd ever been, lately. The wind was so strong it was _baying_.

Except—that wasn't the wind—

Some massive dark shape obtruded on her peripheral vision. She got her wand in her hand, but her Stupefy went flying wide as the dark shape bowled her over into the snow. A wet, slobbery tongue started slavering her neck and ears, and the offensive wet-carpet smell of sodden boarhound assailed her nostrils—

"Bacon!" she shouted, trying to heave the dog off, feeling a helpless sort of hysterical laughter pressing at her lungs. Or maybe that was just fifteen stone worth of overzealous boarhound.

A voice floated over the wind: "Gerroff, yeh bacon-brained dog!"

The pressure was suddenly gone from her chest, along with the eyeful of dark fur and the drooling tongue. "Sorry, miss," said Hagrid, shoving his dog behind his legs. "Can' think what came over him, the ruddy animal."

He hauled Lily out of the snow and set her on her feet. Bacon having knocked her off the path, the snow plunged her into icy numbness up to her thighs.

"Thanks, Hagrid," Lily said, feeling rather like her head had been knocked off and put on upside down. She thumped the heel of her hand against her temple, trying to shake the snow loose from her hair and ears.

"Don' mind Bacon, miss," said Hagrid. "Frien'ly as they come, jus' a little—HOY! Get back, yeh nutty—"

"No, no, it's my fault." Lily fished in her pocket for the remains of her lunch. She still had an entire sandwich left. Unwrapping it from its grease-stained napkin, she tossed it through the air toward Bacon, who was straining at Hagrid's hand, whining and pawing the snow. He leapt up onto his hind legs and snagged the sandwich out of the air in one bite.

"Ahh, that'll account fer it," said Hagrid. "Ruddy mad dog he is for bacon, miss. Always has been."

 _I know,_ Lily wanted to say, smiling, but at that time she supposed she hadn't. Everyone at Hogwarts had known about Hagrid, but she had never really spoken to him until joining the Order. Most students laughed at him.

Snow clung in icy droplets in Hagrid's dark hair, and his nose and cheeks were chapped. He had his crossbow in hand, and strapped to his back was something that looked like a double-headed axe. Lily blinked.

"That's an awful lot of armor for gathering firewood," she said.

"Not firewood, ter be exact," Hagrid said. "Think we got a manticore out in th' forest somewhere. Goin' ter take a look."

"A manticore?" Lily repeated, alarmed.

"Nothin' ter worry about, miss," Hagrid said. "Can' get close to the castle, what with Professer Dumbledore's protections. Better ter be stayin' away from the Forest all th' same, 'specially with th' visibility so low, weather like this. I'd advise yer goin' back inside, miss, where it's warm. No day to be out."

"Right," Lily said. "No, you're right. Thanks, Hagrid. Bye, Bacon," she said, and got her bacon-scented hand slavered, mitten and all.

She tucked her (now slobbery) hands back into her pockets and trudged onto the iced-over path, crunching ice as she made the climb back to the school. Everything was monochrome: the whitened hillside, the dark towers rising toward the opalescent iron-gray of the clouds. Her hair was the only color anywhere in sight, as it blew across her eyes.

She searched the castle's spires for Severus' tower, but she was on the wrong side of the grounds; his window faced over the lake. Being out here felt like trudging through the landscape of his mind—with regard to herself, at least. She could imagine that this was the décor he'd pick to house Feelings About That Daft Lily.

If only she hadn't run off after he took off that bloody spell! If only she'd stopped and thought for a single second, or even if she'd gone looking for him that night. She'd accepted that he was "fine" without even thinking about it, and then she'd seen him and realized he _wasn't fine._ And even if you told someone you were fine, when you weren't and they didn't realize, it upset you. And Severus . . . she wasn't sure she knew much about him at all, anymore, but she got the feeling he was the sort of person who tested others.

And she'd failed.

There was an old, worn-down statuette stuffed into the snow, iced-over. She was just pulling back her foot to give it a sharp kick, imagining it was Life, when for the second time in ten minutes, something power-slammed into her at top-speed and knocked her flat in the snow.

"Wh-hfffh." She raised her head, spitting out snow. The person who'd tackled her was doing the same. "Remus? What the hell—"

"Sorry!" Remus spat snow, too. "I bloody slipped on a stupid patch of ice." But he wasn't looking at her; he was scanning the surrounding hillside without raising more than his head and shoulders, his pale eyes flicking back and forth. "We need to go—lurk somewhere. Come on!"

Bewildered in the extreme, Lily followed him in his scamper up the hill, into the lee of a grouping of boulders standing tall and stoic against the elements in a formation so ancient you felt it in your bones.

"What is going on?" she asked, crouching next to him after he'd motioned her down frantically. The smell of moss was strong over the thin, tangy scent of the ice.

"Rosier, Mulciber, Avery, and Wilkes," Remus said tersely, his wand in his bare hand. _Werewolf body temperature,_ she thought. Remus' temperature always ran about thirty-eight degrees Celcius, whether he was in a blizzard or standing under the full summer sun. "Plotting to ambush you in the library—I mean, they were plotting in the library, not planning to ambush you there—"

" _What_?"

"So they can flush Snape out of wherever he's hiding. You haven't been ambushed, have you? I mean, other than by me, when I slipped—sorry about that—"

"I was at the mercy of Hagrid's dog not ten minutes ago, but that was over a bacon sandwich." She wanted to frown, but her face was so cold it wasn't moving. "I'm not so sure their plan will work. Sev's. . . not too happy with me."

Remus' face probably didn't feel at all frozen; his snow-flecked eyebrows were still able to rustle up his forehead. "You don't honestly believe he'd just let them go after you? No matter how mad he was?"

She shrugged unhappily. She thought about saying, _I'd deserve it_ , but she was sick of everyone acting like she was going barmy.

"This is Snape we're talking about?" Remus pursued. "Severus Snape?"

"I didn't know there were any other Severuses living," she said, the ghost of a smile pressing on her face from the inside, not making it onto her frozen skin.

"Probably not ones who turn a girl's head on backwards for talking trash about you," Remus said. "I remember that. Florence Dutton. Scared a couple of first-year Gryffindors witless. I was trying to help them to class, and—"

"I . . . when was that?" Lily asked, her head feeling similarly twisted around.

"Last term some time, I think?"

She closed her eyes, putting a hand over them. The slobbery one, too.

"But that was when you two. . . weren't talking. Now you're getting on loads better, right?"

"We were," she said dully. "But I. . . I screwed it up. He healed me from that curse—I told you—but. . . it was really hard to do, and once he took it off, I. . . " She swallowed. She didn't want to admit it, but at the same time, she did. "I just _ran_ _off_. I ran off and left him! Outside, in the Forbidden Forest, at night, in the snow, after he'd just done a spell that saved me from dying, and a manticore on the loose, Hagrid just said! And then—" Her voice gained a new, shrill height. "Then I didn't go check up on him till the next _day_ , even though it _occurred_ to me he might be hurt—"

"Oh." Remus' expression was hard to interpret. "Is that what you're really feeling bad about?"

"I—" This wasn't the reply she'd been expecting, and it threw her off track. "What? Of course it is! Are you saying I _shouldn't_ , because it's Snivellus?"

"I should tell you I'm Remus Lupin, not Polyjuiced Sirius Black," Remus said, with that calm that had always made her feel slightly unnerved.

She pressed her clammy mitten over her face, ashamed all over again. "I know. God, I'm sorry."

"You've been through a lot lately, Lily. Snape would know that."

"Maybe," she grit out, reminding herself that no good would come from yelling at Remus. He would just speak patiently and she would feel like even more of a heel. "Maybe not. I don't think we're experts on what Severus would think." Which was a nice way of saying _How do you think you know what Severus thinks like?_

"No." For a moment, there was a flash of emotion in Remus's face, but then it was gone again. She wondered if Remus knew Occlumency.

"But," he said, "that spell was Dark magic, right? Dark magic messes up the way you think. It's more powerful than Light magic, which just hurts your body. Dark magic hurts your—soul, I guess you'd call it. We learned that in Defense—not from the teacher, from the book, so. . . I also think maybe. . ." He hesitated.

"Maybe what?"

Remus stared down at his wand, twisting it in his hands. "I think maybe Snape's not mad about what you think he's mad about."

"What else could he be mad about?"

Remus's his pale eyes dared across the snow, down to the dark forest below, then back up to the pearl-gray sky. "I think . . . "

"Maybe he's regretting he's thrown his lot in with Mudbloods and blood-traitors after all."

A frisson of unpleasantness scuttled down Lily's spine. Remus sharpened all over, like a blurry photograph suddenly brought into focus, but he didn't rise. He just kept his back against the stone, crouched low. Lily followed his example; easier to roll out of the way like that.

Four Slytherin boys melted out from behind the stones, trickling into Lily and Remus' line of sight, lightly fencing them in. She recognized Mulciber, and that one on the far left, she thought, was Avery; but she'd never known them that well. She'd always seen them as a knot of dissonance, rotten boys who'd turned Sev into a monster, mostly interchangeable.

But Severus and his mother said it had been more than that. It had started with the birth of a culture, and Voldemort had used their own hearts against themselves, twisting them out of control. . .

_Not **now** , Lily. Focus on the faux-Death Eaters at hand._

She almost sounded like Severus, there.

"Excuse me," she said coldly. "This is a private conversation."

"You think your thoughts are sacred, Mudblood?" asked the first one who'd spoken, neither Mulciber nor Avery. She pegged this one as the most intelligent of the four, probably their leader.

"I just can't imagine that you'd have anything remotely interesting to contribute," she said as coldly as before. "Seeing as your vocabulary is comprised mostly of bullshit like 'Mudblood' and 'blood-traitor,' which frankly bores me stupid—"

"Shut your filthy face, Mudblood," Avery said.

"Proving her point," Remus said dryly. "Why don't you try for words of three syllables next? One of you go on and give it a shot."

"I have one," Mulciber said in a soft voice that was barely audible over the wind. " _Crucio_."

Lily was prepared for it. She slammed up a Protego as Avery went rolling down the hill from some spell of Remus's, fired at the same moment Mulciber had cast his. One of the unnamed boys fired a shot at Lily from the right; she blocked it as she rolled far enough to the side to be able to leap behind the stone, if she needed, and as she came up on one knee, she aimed a spell at her would-be curser that soared high above his head, because Remus had already knocked him down for the count.

But Rosier got Remus, who slammed back against the rock and crumpled, gasping, his body contorting into a rictus. For a split second Lily almost cast Contrapasso—it was on the tip of her tongue, sizzling down her wand—

_NO._

" _Expelliarmus_!" she yelled, throwing all her power into it, and making two ferocious slashes with her wand. Rosier's wand shot out of his hand, Mulciber's with him, both of them blasted off their feet in a glittering haze of light; she repeated it twice more—" _Expelliarmus_! _Expelliarmus_!"—until she was holding all four wands.

"You," she panted, as they fumbled to their feet far down the slope (except for Avery, who was still out cold), shaking their heads to clear them of spell-daze and snow, " _suck_."

Then she banished their wands as hard as she could. "Fucking find that!" she yelled.

Remus was trying to lurch to his feet. She grabbed him by the arm, pulling it over her shoulder, and staggered through the snow with him draped half over her, away from the stones, cutting up the hill, into the cutting wind. The heat from his body was so powerful it radiated through their double layers of cloaks and robes, the skin of his wrist fevered-feeling against her palm.

"I'm. . . impressed," Remus wheezed. "Honestly, the rock hurt me more than that prick Mulciber's Crucio—he needs better aim, it only hit my arm."

"Enough to be going on with," she grunted.

They gained the perimeter of the courtyard, ducking beneath the stone arches into its shelter. The cobblestones were treacherous with ice and slimy with dirty snow.

"See?" she muttered, her breath misting in front of her in the silent, empty courtyard. Not even the fountain trickled, shut off in the cold. "Severus didn't come. He hates me now."

Remus put out a hand to steady them against the door frame as they navigated up the slippery steps into the corridor.

"When he called you. . . well, you know. . . did you hate him?"

She stared at her feet as they trailed melting rivulets of snow across the dirt-crusted floor. "Yes. For a long time."

"But that didn't make you not care, did it?"

She looked up into Remus' face as best she could with him slung on her shoulder. He gave her a sort of sad, tired smile. The winter sunlight caught a few already-gray hairs, scattering them with silver. For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder how Remus knew so much about forgiveness. She thought he had just read poetry or philosophy or something, but at sixteen. . . what had happened, that had made him understand how it felt to resent someone who meant so much to you?

"I know," he said. "The heart's not clear-cut like that. And you forgave him. If he's angry at you. . . he'll come around. It's what people do."

Lily closed her eyes. She almost swayed. If she hadn't been holding onto Remus, propping him upright, she might have rocked backward, and then perhaps slipped on the ice.

It was funny how people could cut into your heart with reassurances; how kindness could be as cruel as cruelty itself. With patience and a quiet smile, Remus had done what years of soul-searching and hours of self-blame, even Severus's brutal harshness, hadn't done.

It had taken her _death_ in order to get her talking to Severus again. It had taken losing _everything_ in order for her to come around.

And Remus was saying _it shouldn't have._

The tears seemed to freeze in her eyes, like ice cracking over a pond.

"Lily?" With his left arm still pulled over her shoulder—her fingers had gone slack on his wrist—Remus shifted to squeeze her arm. "Really, I don't think it's as bad as you—"

"Let's get you to the infirmary." Her voice sounded like blocks piled haphazardly on top of one another. "Crucio's not just a slap on the wrist."

There was a tiny pause. "All right," Remus said. His hand dropped from her arm.

Lily didn't see any part of the corridor as they went down it together. She felt like her eyes had been turned back into her skull, showing her the inside of herself, the memories carved on the inside of her mind. When she'd looped back through time and first seen Severus, she had thought, _Maybe this time I can stop it._ She had thought she was too late, before she'd understood who Severus was; and then the most prominent worry was to keep him from becoming a Death Eater in name when she'd known he would never be one at heart again.

But she still hadn't really _understood_. You could go back and time and you could change the events in your life without even trying. But to change the _course_ , you had to change yourself.

You were always going to screw up. You might even make the same mistakes. But if you handled the mistakes as badly the second time around as you'd done the first, that's when you really became hopeless.

And she wasn't going to be like that.

Not this time.

* * *

 

They were both so unobservant. Lupin he could credit, but Lily had lived a war. She ought to have learned to pay better attention to her surroundings.

" _Severus didn't come. He hates me now,_ " she'd said.

Her tone had been dull and defeated, not self-righteous or begging for sympathy. It was what she really thought.

 _Well, what else would she think, with the way you've been acting?_ he asked himself.

 _I don't hate you_ , he thought, watching her go. He was _angry_ , yes. The sight of her talking to Potter in the Prefects' Bath, of her leaning over him to check that he hadn't been hurt; the thought of her sitting in classes with that fugitive from Hell, touching him in those small ways of hers, were all maddening enough _before_ they blended in his mind with images recycled from the past—Lily laughing with them, the long, red stream of her hair on the road to Hogsmeade in their midst; her wedding pictures in the _Prophet_ , all her color melted down to black-and-white, and her smile—

It had already happened; it would happen again. He had gone back in time to watch _the same thing happen again_ , and the fact that she was _already_ in love with Potter made it so much the worse. For six years, when barely more than a child, he had feared that Potter would take her away from him; now, he knew the moronic bastard _would_. And the fact that he knew the trajectory of their life, that it would turn out even more perfectly because this time around he wouldn't be sealing their fate under any prophecies, was as painful as any Dark magic backlash he'd ever felt. The future was like Dark magic running through his memories, down into his soul.

Many times during his old life, he had told himself that he continued to feel so strongly about Lily because he'd lost her; that if their lives hadn't bifurcated in that fatal way and her separate path hadn't cut off with her death, he would have learned to move on. To let go. There had even been moments across the past couple of weeks when he had prayed to wake up and realize this had happened.

But it didn't. The heart didn't let go that easily. He really hated that about it.

And when he hurt her, he hurt himself. But he couldn't _not_ hurt her, because just by being herself, she hurt him—by loving Potter, by embracing those boys; by smiling at himself, and apologizing, and _meaning_ it; he could feel she meant it, and not just because she was a terrible liar. Even the sight of her face lit by the glow of her star-lights hurt. Her _kindness_ hurt, even her remorse, as much as her anger and spite ever had. And now that, towards himself, the anger and spite was gone, he was left with only the pain of her realness, and that was worse, so much worse. A real person was more damaging and more rewarding than any memory of them; it hurt more, and it was worth more. The pain of having this and knowing one day he wouldn't any longer made him cruel. It had happened before, but this time would be nothing like the time before, because she would probably be _sorry_.

He had always found it far easier to be hated than to endure another person's compassion.

Once she and Lupin sank out of sight into the well of the castle, Severus melted out of the shadow of the evergreens that grew close on the courtyard, sheltered in the castle's lee, to position himself on the path leading down toward the slope. He could see Avery, Wilkes, Rosier, and Mulciber on the icy expanse of the snow, their black school robes stark against the white grounds.

Their progress was slow, but he'd learned patience. He waited as they collected themselves, clumped together on the hill, and then began to stagger towards the school above. He waited as they navigated the path, slipping and tripping over one another.

He waited as they saw him, stopped, and slowly resumed climbing toward him. And then he waited until he could see the whites of their eyes before he spoke.

"You don't look well," he said. "Lose a tussle with a couple of do-gooder Gryffindors?"

"Shut it, Snape, you Mudblood-fucker," Rosier mumbled, because he could barely part his lips. He coughed, doubling up, clutching his stomach.

"Dear me," Severus said. "Is that blood?"

Rosier tried to straighten, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving an ugly red streak across his chin.

"I can't imagine a Gryffindor would know a spell that would hurt any of you this badly," Severus said softly. "But I do."

"You weren't anywhere near us, Snape," Avery muttered, wiping at his bleeding nose.

"I'm glad you've developed the cognitive ability to tell when someone is standing around in sight of you and when they're not. No, Avery, I wasn't there. But then, I didn't have to be. I took a precaution, you see."

In another lifetime, he would have smiled at their expressions, those attempts at anger and stone. But this was no different from tormenting Regulus, except insofar as it _this_ was necessary. For all that Regulus was the family favorite, the perfect Slytherin prince of the House of Black, Regulus was not violent or sadistic. His older brother, the noble Gryffindor, was really more of a true Black than Regulus, _convinced_ that goodness and evil were innate and it was his job to stamp the latter out. Regulus had, in a strange way, always more closely resembled Lily: when forced to hurt other people in combat, he came to pieces. His conviction didn't extend to retribution.

But these boys were a different story. He knew how their minds worked. He'd been friends of a sort with them for most of those years that flowed between the shores of childhood and adulthood. He'd watched some of them die, seen others sent to prison. Wrapping protections around Lily that caused pain to rebound on her attackers brought him no pleasure, but he didn't bother with guilt, either. He made the choice he could live with, and he lived with it.

He knew that Gryffindors and Slytherins weren't so different from one another, really. They were both absolutely sure of their course, for one thing. But Gryffindors needed to believe they had the moral right. Slytherins, at their core, asked themselves, "What can I live with to do what I must?" And self answered, "You can live with whatever you have to."

Hogwarts was the prepping room for the stage of life. For seven years you believed the world was divided into four Houses, and your heart lived where it had been sent when it was eleven. But then you grew up.

This business with these four boys who would become Death Eaters and the four Gryffindors who, in another life, had died the most pointless of deaths in a game of glory—it as all just a pathetic little game. It had _always_ been such a pathetic game.

It still was. He simply intended to win, this time.

"I thought you might try this," he said flatly. "Using Lily as bait to get to me—it exhibits an almost human intelligence. I congratulate you. It was too bad I had already ensured that anyone who attacked her would . . . injure themselves."

Avery didn't get it, but Rosier did. Who knew what Mulciber thought. Wilkes was at least _trying_ to figure it out.

"You piece of shit," Rosier said quietly.

"Sticks and stones, Rosier," Severus said, feeling much older than thirty-eight. Perhaps time flowed differently through different parts of life. Your body felt time in one way, and your heart and mind their own, separate ways. "In this case, far less effective than I have been. But if you like, think of me as giving you a greater purpose. If you die trying to tick off Lily Evans, you'll be performing a public service. Then the air you breathe can be put to better use sustaining bread mold."

Then he turned and strode off, years of practice making the icy cobblestones less trouble to navigate without falling on his arse.

One less thing to take care of before he left this prepping stage for good.


	20. Chapter 20

Lily didn't know when James and Sirius were Ennervated and returned to form because her last class was Arithmancy and they didn't have that with her. Only Remus was there, healed from his abortive brush with Cruciatus and staring often at the wall. Neither of them took many notes.

As if from some unspoken solidarity, they descended to the Great Hall side-by-side for dinner, but still not speaking. As soon as they set foot across the threshold, however—

"Evans." James popped up as if he'd Apparated from the Gryffindor table to the doors. Lily leapt a good foot off the ground.

She could not deal with this right now—with the unsolvable equation of James and Severus, and how being kind to one seemed to either hurt the other so much; to cause even _worse_ problems than outright _cruelty_ would.

"Not right now, James, _please_ ," she grit out, and sped to the right, circumnavigating the Hufflepuff table to approach Gryffindor the long way round. She squeezed in next to some second-years, who wouldn't be clever enough to be catty or like her enough to ask her what was wrong, and tried to ignore the Marauders up the table: James, Sirius and Peter putting their heads together, while Remus opened up a book and frowned at it.

She piled some kind of food on her plate and went through the motions of chewing and swallowing, but she didn't taste a single calorie. Eventually she gave up even stirring her mashed potatoes into an even more mashed mush and put her head in her hands.

What was she going to _do_? How could she help Severus, and keep all her friends? There had to be some way to reconcile these separate aspects of her life. It couldn't be down to making a _choice_. . . she'd already made that choice once, and it had turned out. . .

It had. . .

A stern, brisk voice sounded at her elbow, dragging her out of these thoughts as if by the neck of her robes.

"Miss Evans."

She raised her head from her hands. Professor McGonagall stood over her, stern and brisk as ever.

_Shit._

She cleared her throat. "Yes, Professor?"

"The Headmaster wishes to speak to you."

Lily closed her eyes.

_A tête-à-tête must be avoided at all costs. . ._

Knowing it was hopeless, she scanned the Slytherin table for some sign of Severus. Nothing.

She told herself not to feel so wretched. She'd _known_ it would be hopeless. And she was a grown woman—a survivor of more than one battle. Failing to survive Voldemort when he showed up at your house, that was an extenuating circumstance. She could survive a chat with Dumbledore. Easy.

But this stern, Gryffindorly pep talk failed to make her stomach feel like anything but full of lead mice.

She let her knife clatter onto her plate next to her fork with a metallic thud and left the table without looking at anyone.

They passed out of the warmth and brightness of the Great Hall into the icy cavern of the foyer beyond, and began to climb the grand staircase into the shadows of the floors above. Lily had almost never been out in the castle during the times when everyone else was elsewhere; the swell of noise murmuring through the Great Hall's walls seemed to make the rest of the castle more deeply silent. She imagined this was what it would feel like to deep-dive from the shallows into water leagues-deep: cold, dark, and soundless.

"What does Professor Dumbledore want to speak with me about, Professor?" Lily asked, trying to sound as if she couldn't possibly think what she could've done to deserve his attention.

"I'm not privy to that information, Miss Evans."

_Great. Can't even prepare._

On the second landing, McGonagall said, with a stern look over the tops of her glasses, "I'm aware, Miss Evans, that Mr Snape chose not to avail himself of Madam Pomfrey's services. I thought I could entrust you to ensure that he did?"

Lily's stomach turned a backwards somersault. "I thought I could, too," she muttered.

McGonagall pursed her lips. "Mr Snape seems to have. . . undergone some significant changes while he was away for the holidays. Although he hasn't been to class since returning to school—aside from cameo appearances yesterday in Defense and Herbology, I understand—the change has been distinctly marked."

Lily's throat felt like a bird had just flown into it and got stuck.

They were now within sight of the Headmaster's guardian gargoyle. She fought a wild urge to sprint in the opposite direction. She wished Severus were here to help her deal with this.

"Butternut toffee," said Professor McGonagall, and the gargoyle obligingly scooted to the left as a portion of the stone scraped upward, revealing the doorway.

To Lily's surprise, McGonagall stepped onto the staircase before her and accompanied her on the spiraling ride to the top. Striding forward, she rapped on the door, twice, no-nonsense, and turned the handle without waiting for a summons.

Lily crossed the threshold into the Head's office for the first time a long time. Even though she hadn't seen it at all for at least a year, and even though this was three years _before_ the last time she'd seen it, everything appeared identical. The juxtaposition of time was dizzying.

Dumbledore sat behind his desk, in robes of magnificent emerald. Lily's stomach and her heart tried to subtly change places. She'd grown accustomed to chatting with him in the arm chairs by the fire as barest equals, not as teacher and student with the mile of desk between. She was used to being fully honest with him, open and confiding. Now she was here to lie to the man it was impossible to lie to.

_You have to make him see it wasn't Severus who hurt you. You have to make him see that Severus would **never** hurt you—that Severus would hurt himself to **heal** you. That he'd run the risk of **dying** to make something right. . ._

Her throat felt tight. The office was so bright and warm, even though the sky outside the windows was black. The fire was merry and the portraits dozed, their thready snores weaving with the soft, hissing whirrs of Dumbledore's flashing silver instruments, stitching a tapestry of peaceful noise. The air in here smelled of brown-sugar and the musky depth of tea-leaves, and Dumbledore was smiling, quiet and benign, as if nothing was wrong that couldn't be made right. That's what she'd always felt, walking into this room.

She suddenly wanted to tell him everything. She wanted to pour out to him all the worries that were prickling her heart. She could feel the desire pressing at her throat, a tide of words and confessions—

_CONFESSIONS._

The word blazed between her ears like brushfire surging into an open field. Confessions—Contrapasso—Dark magic—Severus dying in front of her, his skin branding at her touch, the touch of the one who'd cursed him, telling her— _He meant for your son to die, but he kept it from me, he used my remorse against me, and I did it, I committed exactly what he wanted, all along—_

Lily had to grip the back of the nearest chair at hand. She was afraid if she opened her mouth that she would be sick.

"Thank you, Minerva," Dumbledore said, smiling benignly at them both. "I can always rely on you to be prompt and effective."

Then he turned that X-ray gaze on Lily. It went through her like a bullet through a pat of butter, and a way to stall them suddenly blazed white-hot in her mind.

She rasped, "Severus's dad died over the holidays."

McGonagall and Dumbledore both stared at her, firelight glinting on their spectacle lenses. Lily held her breath, heart knocking about between her ribs.

"Died?" McGonagall repeated, as if she'd never heard of someone doing this.

Lily unstuck her lips. "On—on Christmas. He was hit by a car. I—I went to the funeral."

". . . My goodness." McGonagall's habitually severe eyebrows creased. "The poor boy."

Dumbledore, his fingers steepled in front of his chin, lowered his hands to regard Lily with unnerving depth. He said thoughtfully, "I am sure it was a comfort to Mr Snape to have a friend during such a difficult and sorrowful time."

Lily kept silent for a number of reasons, not the least of which being she wasn't sure. She still didn't know how much the death of his father had affected Severus. She hardly knew anything anymore about the way he thought or felt. . . even when his control lapsed and she saw him reacting, she didn't understand _why_ he felt the way he did. It was like she only saw the top layer of everything, and Severus existed fathoms below that.

"Please have a seat, Miss Evans," Dumbledore said, with a kindly gesture at the chair in front of his desk, the one whose back she was gripping. "Thank you, Minerva. I apologize for keeping you from your dinner."

McGonagall swept out. Lily sank into the execution chair as the study door twumped shut. She'd always had a much easier time facing off against her enemies than she'd ever done lying, especially if it was to someone she considered a friend—

" _Dumbledore knew the boy had to die, but he kept it from me until it was too late. . ."_

Lily swallowed and stared at Dumbledore's shoulder.

"Have I done something—wrong, sir?"

"Not at all," Dumbledore assured her, like Santa Claus soothing a child's fears that it would be getting coal. "I'm glad to see you looking so well, in fact. I must confess that when I saw your state in the infirmary two days ago, I worried very much for your safety. But I understand you're feeling quite like your old self again?"

"Yes, sir," Lily said, the tail end of the word swallowed by a tap on the study door.

"Come in, Poppy," Dumbledore called. The door clicked open and, sure enough, Madam Pomfrey rustled in. Dumbledore had called Lily here for a check-up?

Instinct told Lily this was Very Not Hood. How much did Dumbledore know about her curse? How much did he know about Dark cures in general? How—

"Good evening, Miss Evans," Madam Pomfrey said briskly. Before Lily could stammer her first syllable, Madam Pomfrey's wand was whisking over her from hairline to shoe sole, weaving back up to encircle her head, and then tapping on the underside of her wrist.

"Pulse normal, fatigue at normal levels, for a convalescent of a Dark spell—"

Lily couldn't stop her violent twitch. Madam Pomfrey carried on:

"And I recognize blood when I see it." She pointed at Lily's cuff.

"That was from Severus. I mean—" she said hastily when Madam Pomfrey's eyebrows snapped together. "It's his blood. Sirius—Black—hexed him in the face and he got a cut."

"That explains Professor McGonagall asking me, when she brought Mr Potter and Mr Black to me on stretchers, if Mr Snape had come to see me, and her consternation when I said 'absolutely not.' Miss Evans is not performing at the top of her game, Headmaster," Madam Pomfrey said, "but she's well enough to be going on with. The symptoms of the curse appear almost fully healed, as far as my diagnostic spells are capable of registering."

"Thank you, Poppy. Your most thorough diagnosis relieves a great weight from my mind. You must feel similarly, Miss Evans," he went on kindly. "Although, perhaps you had already been aware you were out of danger?"

While Lily sat struggling with any number of disastrous replies, Dumbledore smiled at Pomfrey. "I won't keep you from your rest any longer, Poppy. Thank you for attending on this matter."

"There's no rest with those five boys in this castle," Pomfrey said tartly. "And even less than the usual since all of Slytherin seems to have kicked itself into some kind of inter-house furor."

Lily twitched. _Slytherin's not safe_ , Severus had said. She would've asked what Madam Pomfrey meant _specifically_ —how she knew what Lily didn't know, what Severus was keeping from her—but she was already at the door and turning the handle. In the next moment she had gone, leaving only the lingering tang of antiseptic ointment overlaying the wood smoke from the fire.

"Quite a few events of interest have been brewing in Slytherin lately," Dumbledore said thoughtfully, making Lily dig her fingers into the seat of her chair. "I wonder, Miss Evans, if you've any insight?"

"In—into Slytherin?" she stammered.

"Indeed." Dumbledore smiled slightly behind his beard. "Seeing as you've an inside source, as it were."

" . . . Severus isn't really very communicative," she muttered, which was the gospel truth.

Dumbledore nodded as if considering the wisdom of this statement. "It doesn't surprise me that Mr Snape plays it close to the vest, as I believe the Muggle saying is. Having to do with poker, doesn't it?"

"I—guess?"

Another smile. "Do you take tea, Miss Evans? Some lapsang souchong? Perhaps Earl Grey?"

"I . . . "

"Do try the lapsang," Dumbledore advised, and a tray appeared on the desk at his right without any signal or sound beyond a faint 'clink.' "I've become a bit partial to it myself and overfilled the school stores with it, but no one else will drink it . . . tea kept for too long dries out, you know. Biscuit? These with the mint frosting are an exquisite find, if I do say so myself."

Wordlessly, Lily accepted a round biscuit with pale green icing the color of St. Mungo's walls, wondering if any Veritaserum was lining the inside of the teapot. Or the cream pot, for that matter. Dumbledore was liberally dousing his tea with cream and sugar . . . but—she stared at the silver spoon he was swirling through his tea, the metal _ting-ting-ting_ ing on the porcelain—he could have taken an antidote . . .

"I hope Mr Snape is decently recovered?" Dumbledore asked, tapping his spoon delicately on the rim of his cup to shake loose the tea drops.

The biscuit's icing was sticky against her damp fingers. "I—what?"

"From the events over the holidays." Dumbledore, cup raised to his bushy silver mustache, blew on his tea.

"I . . . don't know if you can bounce back from the death of your dad like that . . . "

"Oh, not those events," Dumbledore said, as though apologetic that he'd misled her. "You are quite right—death affects the living as profoundly as it affects its dead. No, I was referring to Mr Snape's brief stint in St. Mungo's. Mmm. Excellently brewed, as ever."

Lily, in the process of reaching for her tea, knocked her cup over. The tea scalded her hand and sluiced across the desk; a stack of papers jumped out of the way, and a letter in-box stood up on its hind legs to avoid it.

"Oh God—I'm so sorry—"

"No, Miss Evans, I do beg your pardon." Dumbledore vanished the tea with a wave of his wand, and with another cooled a healing spell across her stinging hands. "Forgive my callousness. You are not yet recovered. Mr Snape possesses an excellent grasp of Dark cures—far better than I had dreamed—but we must be realistic, mustn't we?"

He was pouring another cup of tea and walking around the desk to her side to deliver it. Now he had taken her arm and was guiding her over to the fireside, pressing her gently into a chair and the tea cup tenderly into her numb hands.

"There, Miss Evans. Put a spot of warmth in your stomach; it will do you good."

Hands shaking, Lily raised the cup to her mouth. The warm liquid leaked onto her bottom lip—

The study door banged open and Severus pierced the bright warmth of Dumbledore's office, his face cold and rigidly controlled, his personality _radiating_ out from him like the penumbra of an eclipse.

That time, Lily spilled the tea all down her front.

"Sev!" she gasped, over the tinkling sound of porcelain breaking on the carpet below. For a split second she felt like a lost lamb that had just spotted its shepherd on the hill above.

But Severus didn't even acknowledge that she was there. He pinned Dumbledore, who appeared mildly pleased to see him, with a _searing_ look of displeasure.

"It's illegal to give your students Veritaserum," he said, lip curling, and pointed his wand at the door so that it shut with a bang that echoed into the thick human-silence of the room.

"Quite right, Mr Snape," Dumbledore said, as though pleased to hear that Severus had such a comprehensive grasp of legalities. "As it happens, I intended no such infringement of Miss Evans' trust." He vanished the shards of Lily's broken cup. "I fear I should have served her something less damaging than tea, however . . . would you care for any?"

"If you want to interrogate someone," Severus said, his eyes narrowing to dark slits, "you ought, in good conscience, to go straight to the source. Striking your enemies on their weakest flank is hardly Gryffindor of you, is it?"

"Are you my enemy, Mr Snape?" Dumbledore asked, as if mildly surprised to consider such a thing.

To Lily's shock, Severus didn't answer right away. He only stared at Dumbledore, his face sharp with some emotion she couldn't define, his eyes even sharper, and glittering, again, like moonlight on water.

"You tell me, Headmaster."

Lily's heart flickered. She stole a fearful glance at Professor Dumbledore and found him gazing back at Severus, now intensely serious.

"I have been attempting to figure that out," Dumbledore said at last, quiet and calm.

"Yes." Severus' whole face curled with his sneer. "And you've enlisted Lily to help you—a Gryffindor who couldn't tell an amnesiac on Thursday that it was really Wednesday."

"It is not Miss Evans' ability to lie that interested me," Dumbledore said, still calm and quiet. "I know she has a good heart. I have been pleased to think the two of you have finally set aside your differences. But you look tired, Mr Snape—I might even say 'exhausted.' Perhaps a visit to Madam Pomfrey is in order? I must confess, until I spoke to Miss Evans, I was trying to account for how supremely unwell you appear... But then, I reflected you've had a busy holiday. My condolences for the loss of your father. . . I hope whatever kept you in hospital has been cured?"

Severus didn't even blink. "Extensively."

"I trust it didn't keep you from anything important," Dumbledore went on, with conversational concern.

Severus' face curved in a smile. But all he said was, "Is Lily in trouble, then?"

"I can't think of what she would have done to be in trouble with me or any of her professors, no."

"Then she's free to leave?" Severus asked. Not aggressive, but almost . . . Sphinx-like.

"Yes," Dumbledore said, nodding once. "I only wished for Madam Pomfrey to look her over, to assure us all that she had been fully cured. You must tell me how you did it, some day. It must have been quite the feat."

Severus accorded him a very slight bow. Lily realized he was _bloody well showing off_ and could have thrown a teacup at him.

"Thank you, Miss Evans," Dumbledore said, helping her from her chair. "It was lovely to chat with you both." He smiled at them. "Most enlightening—a remarkable occurrence which happens so seldom in conversation these days, I find."

"Good—good night, sir," Lily warbled, and let Severus thrust her out of the room and bundle her onto the staircase.

She felt weak with relief, and had to lean on Severus in order not to pitch headfirst down the stairs. She wasn't even sure why that meeting, with Dumbledore's inconsequential questions and earth-shattering nonsequitur, had made her feel so wobbly-kneed, but it definitely had. When she'd prayed for Severus' help, she hadn't meant for him to show up and make things worse by acting like. . . like a _bloke_.

"What is the matter with you?" she said weakly as the stairs crunched downward.

"I sincerely doubt I gave him any more or _less_ information than you did in the time before I got there," Severus said coldly. His grip on her arm was almost cruel. The door at the bottom of the stairs ground upward; he ducked beneath it as it rose, pulling her after him.

The corridor was hung with trails of smoke. She blinked, and then jumped when she tread on something squishy.

"James!" she squawked; but he was out cold. Peter, equally unconscious, lay slumped across him with an egg-shaped lump on his forehead.

"They were waiting for you outside the Head's office," said Severus with brutal indifference. "For you to come down, I assume. I needed in, so they needed putting out."

Madam Pomfrey hadn't been wrong. She and Lily might _both_ need committing if all five of them kept this up—

She knelt to feel for James' pulse. Her hand hovered over Peter, but she hesitated, heart thumping. . .

Severus' hand suddenly clamped down on her wrist. She started as violently as the time she'd stuck her finger in a power outlet. Her heart was slamming about in her ribcage.

"S-Sev?" she said shakily.

He turned her hands over. For some reason, her palms were very red, as though she'd been playing with chalk.

"Have you been playing with pollen?" Severus demanded. Now he was staring at her mouth, eyes narrowed. Lily felt a flush creeping up over her neck. Somehow, she felt even more jittery in this cold, drafty hall, with Severus, who knew everything, than she had upstairs with Dumbledore who could endanger Severus by figuring out too much. . .

"No," she rasped, "I just spilled tea on myself—in the office, I knocked it over—"

"And you drank some," Severus said, eyes still narrowed on her face. She nodded mutely. "He put something in your tea."

"V-veritaserum?"

"He doesn't need it with you. It's a powder called Show-Me-Now; it reveals when someone has been exposed to Dark magic."

"B-but I was. The curse—"

He shook his head. Then he froze. She glanced quickly to the right and the left, but they were alone, no Marauders or teachers—

He dropped her hand as if she'd poured scalding tea on him. _Oh_ , she thought, her heart sinking. . .

"You're exposed to Dark magic when a curse is performed near you, not necessarily on you. Dark curses can take effect over distance if you have a piece of the intended victim. But when I healed you, you were exposed. It. . . clings."

"But—you were curing me—"

"Dark cures are still Dark magic," he said. "They simply aren't Dark _curses_."

"Do—do you mean—are Dark cures illegal?"

"Yes," Severus said. "Because they're _Dark magic_."

"But—but that doesn't make any sense! Can you cure Dark curses with Light magic? I'll bet you can't—"

"When has Wizarding law ever been fair?" Severus said, with artistic contempt.

Lily rubbed her palms on her robes, but the color stayed where it was, vivid and taunting. A sudden urge rose in her, to storm back upstairs and tell Dumbledore exactly what she thought of this—this _cheap_ _shot_. It was as if all her determination to defend and protect Severus meant nothing; as if she might as well not have tried, and that was a horrible thing to do to someone—

Tears prickled at her eyes, splintering the corridor around her, patchy with shadows and stark with Severus's black-and-white. "Thank you—for coming to find me—how did you know where I—?"

He pulled something papery from his sleeve and passed it over. She unfolded the paper and saw—

"How did you get this?" she gasped, almost dropping the Marauder's Map.

"I summoned it before we left the Prefects' bath, obviously. I thought it would make my stay in gaol slightly more pleasant if they couldn't know where I was every second of the day." His lip curled. "Now we're on equal footing again. No planning ambushes with the exact knowledge of where I'll be in five minutes."

"They—they wouldn. . ."

His expression as his eyes fixed on her made her skin want to shrivel into her bones.

"They . . . they didn't," she said hoarsely. . . not in denial, but in numb disbelief. She thought they'd come to find him in the Prefects' Bath because she was with him . . . she'd thought it had to do with her, with finding her. . .

Her head spun. If that's what they'd used the Map for, that was so. . . so _low_. . .

"I'll have that back, thank you." He snatched the map out of her hands and stood, turning his back on her again.

"Sev—" she started desperately. She took two steps after him, and then stumbled on James' outstretched hand.

She looked down, at James, his mouth hanging slackly open, bit her lip, and felt an odd feeling rise in her chest. . .

_Severus's need is greater._

She didn't know if it _was_ , but James, at least, wouldn't know that she'd left him to go after Sev, whereas Sev would know she'd left him to stay with James. . . with someone who'd plotted to ambush him, with an advantage Sev hadn't even _known_ about at the time—

Picking up her heels, she dashed around the corner after Severus—and ploughed headlong into his ramrod-straight back, stubbing her nose. "Oomf! Sev—"

He snapped his hand up, palm out, and stood with his head cocked to the side, his whole body as still as a deer listening for the sounds of blundering hunters in the underbrush. Then, without warning, he shimmied behind a half-open velvet curtain haphazardly concealing an alcove, vanishing from her sight.

Lily blinked, but in the next second she heard two familiar voices—

She dived into the alcove next to Severus and stubbed her toe on the stone plinth on which a vase was sitting. She started to swear, but Severus hissed at her and she clamped her lips shut.

She squeezed behind the plinth next to him as the voices washed perfectly audible around the blind corner.

". . . that—" And here Sirius indulged in a litany of insults, in which references to Severus's hygiene and the word 'fuck' were most prominent. Reading between the profanity, Lily deduced he was rising to new heights of obscenity because Severus had nicked their map.

"Would you keep your bloody voice down, please?" Remus hissed. "If a teacher heard you, that'd be at least two days' worth of detention."

"You worry about detention too much," Sirius snarled. (Lily edited out the seven 'fucks' he'd strung between the six words.)

"Which is probably why I spend far less time in it than you do," Remus retorted. Lily was surprised. She wouldn't have thought Remus could _sound_ that firm. Had Pomfrey put something in that nerve-booster she'd given him?

"Or maybe you're just sticking up for that"—Lily edited again, something rather harsher than the usual—"grease factory again."

"He _is_ the only reason I'm not blind, Padfoot."

"Oh yeah? And why do you think he did that? Out of the goodness of his shriveled greasy heart?" Sirius' voice suddenly shot from mocking to sharp; they were now standing stationary on the other side of the curtain. "What?"

"I—nothing," Remus said, sounding about as opaque as a glass house. Next to Lily, Severus shifted the tiniest bit. She stole a peripheral glance at him, but the light patching the alcove from the corridor was too indifferent for her to make out his face.

"What do you mean, what?" Remus asked, sounding badly nonchalant.

"Your expression just changed, like you know something. What the—"

Lily decided just to edit out all the 'fuck's from Sirius's half of the conversation. She was all for self-expression, but _honestly_.

"—did he do?" Sirius finished.

"He _healed_ me, Padfoot, I bloody well told you a million times already, thanks."

"Yeah?" Sirius said aggressively. "You still haven't told me why."

"D'you honestly think Snape would've told _me_ why? It's probably to have something to hold over our heads. Or to impress Lily. Maybe both—no reason why he shouldn't combine motives."

Lily felt oddly embarrassed, her face hot.

"If that slimy—thinks we're going to thank him—"

"No, why would we thank him for making sure I'm _not_ _blind_?"

"He's up to something, Moony. Don't tell me you haven't noticed, you're supposed to be the one with all the brains. Shove in his ugly face that Evans wouldn't get her knickers off for him for all the gold in Gringotts and he'd turn into a frothing mess—"

Lily was sure she'd been more horrified, even recently, but she couldn't remember when it was.

"—unable to remember a single spell. He was always a pathetic loser, and I've called him a creep a million times if I've said it once, but now he's _really_ a creep. Gone and joined up with that—Voldemort, that's what he's done."

"And healing werewolves and Muggle-borns is, what, part of Death Eater extracurricular activity?" Remus said with heavy sarcasm.

"It's a blinder," Sirius said, "a way to throw us off."

"Well, it's sure not working. Padfoot, look at it logically, at least for five seconds—there's no way Snape could convince anyone that he's... turned over a new leaf or whatever, with a few random acts of kindness. No one would buy it. No one _is_ buying it. It's not _good_ _enough_ to be a screen."

"It's got you and Evans thinking there's nothing wrong with him," Sirius shot back.

"Oh right, two students out of a couple thousand, plus teachers. That's got to be the worst cover in the history of time."

"Snivellus's always focused on the wrong thing, Moony," Sirius said curtly, and stormed off, his footsteps thudding on the carpet.

Remus muttered, " . . . not the only one . . . " and disappeared more quietly after him.

Lily was glad the alcove was so dim, because she couldn't look at Severus and didn't want him looking at her. She honestly couldn't remember the last time she'd been this mortified.

In the near-distance, she could her them finding James and Peter: Sirius was swearing even more profoundly, turning the air blue even from around the corner. She winced. Remus' quieter voice was trying to make itself heard, but clearly not having any luck.

Severus shifted beside her and started to slither out of the alcove. Panic flashed in her chest, unfocused but powerful; her fingers latched onto his sleeve, the wool follicles piercing beneath her nails.

"Wai—" she started.

He stilled, but didn't move forward or back. For long moments, he didn't speak, and she couldn't. She didn't know what to _say_. She didn't even know what she wanted to say, let alone what would be right to.

"Yes?" he said finally, absolutely cold.

"Can . . . can we talk about this?" she asked. She sounded weak, almost pathetic, and she hated it. Now was when she needed to be _wise_. She used to be good at this. . .

_You might have been good at it when one of your dorm-mates broke up with a boyfriend she'd been seeing for two weeks, or when a second-year student needed help in Charms, but when it comes to Severus—this Severus—he's always been the one helping **you**. Where do you even **start**?_

That was the thing. She didn't know.

"What's to talk about?" His voice was quiet, still cold, but with caverns of dark harshness beneath. "You knew what they're like."

"N-no! I didn't—not. . . " _I didn't know they were this bad_ , she thought, feeling hurt and bewildered. In a weird way, she felt like she'd been lied to.

"You didn't?" Severus asked. His tone sounded indifferent.

She shook her head, silent.

"Did you think all the hexing was really for a laugh, then?"

"I—" God, what was wrong with her? She was always on the verge of bursting into tears again. This all felt so like that horrible time during OWLs, when she'd quit speaking to him and everything someone said made her hurt, made her angry, so that she was filled up with anger and with tears. "You were all so horrible to each other."

"Yes," Severus said quietly. "We were."

Then he shook her hand loose gently, with a twist of his shoulders, and flickered out of sight. Lily let her hand fall limply to her side. The stones in the alcove dug into her shoulder blades, soaking cold through her wool robes, but she didn't care. She felt hot all over, and miserable. She tucked her arms around herself, shivering, wondering how she could ever have thought that coming back here would make the future clearer. Right now, it was only darker and more unfathomable than ever.

But she knew what the past was like. She knew what she _didn't_ want the future to be like.

She narrowed her eyes, clenched her hands into fist to firm her resolve, and strode out of the alcove after Severus.


	21. Chapter 21

"Is your head okay?" Remus asked.

"Yeah." James grimaced, rubbing it as he slumped back on his pillows. "That slimy Snivellus. . ."

Remus tuned out while James, Sirius, and Peter spent a few moments indulging with their favorite appellations for Snape, with varying degrees of profanity (110% of which came from Sirius). In a parodic reversal of their usual roles, tonight Remus was the one applying ointment to his friends' cuts and performing the little healing spells while they lay about and moaned.

"James," Remus interrupted, after about eight solid minutes of Snape-abuse had transpired, "why does it matter so much?"

"—what?" James blinked wide hazel eyes behind his glasses. With his round lenses and tufty hair, he looked an awful lot like an owl.

"Why does it matter so much that Lily spends time with Snape?" Remus asked, careful to keep his voice calm and patient and open-minded.

"Because he's Snape!"

"Would you feel this way if Macdonald or Crawley or Meadowes was spending time with Snape?"

"They wouldn't be mad enough to, Moony!"

Remus sighed. This was like trying to explain to his six-year-old cousin Diana that she shouldn't push the other kids over and grab their toys out of their hands. Not that Lily was a toy, but James sure acted like she was; the good one that Snape had got to first.

"What Moony's asking, Prongs," Sirius said, leaning his elbows on his knees, "is why the shit does Evans matter?"

Remus hadn't expected this sudden entry into the ranks, but he was curious to see what Sirius had in mind. Knowing Sirius, an ambush, probably. . .

Then Peter entered the fray. "She's been stuck on Snivellus from day one."

James' lenses flashed, as if righteous indignation were a light from Heaven and it was shining on him. "What do you mean, why does Evans matter? She's Evans!"

"James," Remus said, still patiently, "we know you fancy her. But _why_ do you fancy her?"

"Wh . . . why . . . " James stared at Remus like he couldn't believe he would ask such a thing.

"She's no fun," Sirius said, flat and blunt. "She's a nag. She thinks Snivellus fucking Snape is a good mate, so she's obviously off her rocker. She calls you a toe-rag or a prat every time the opportunity affords. When has Evans ever been _nice_ to you, Prongs?"

"Crawley is nice," said Peter helpfully. "Or Marlowe. Charlotte Marlowe fancies you, James, did you know that?"

"Charlotte Marlowe is fine, all right?" James said, his eyebrows creasing. "But she's not Evans."

"But James," Remus said, "what's so special about Lily? To you. We like Lily," he mostly lied, since he knew Sirius didn't like her at all and he honestly wasn't sure about Peter, "but why do _you_ fancy her so much?"

"I. . . " James blinked. Remus watched him shrewdly. He would bet James had never thought about this at all—he'd just latched onto her, perhaps because she was pretty, or perhaps because she made herself noticeable by scorning him—but did James _realize_ he'd never thought about it?

Remus would bet any amount of gold you could name that he hadn't.

"I . . . what's this about, really?" James stared around at the three of them, one after the other. "Padfoot?"

"Mate," Sirius said, his eyes fixed on James across the space between their beds, "Evans is all right to look at, I'll give you. She's got a pretty good rack and her arse isn't bad either. But other than that, she's a bleeding shrew who'd sniff to give you the time of day if she'd got five watches on. Myself, I don't see what there is to fancy in a bird who doesn't give a shit whether you're in the room or not."

James looked stunned, like Sirius had smacked him between the eyes with a wet sock. Remus didn't dare say he thought Lily was nicer than _that_ ; he didn't want to feed James' obsession with her. Five-and-a-half years was long enough to dangle after a girl who never gave you any real encouragement, especially when your method of courtship ran to tormenting one of her friends. If James honestly fancied her as Lily, not as some pretty girl who owned the distinction of being the only girl ever to have argued with him, that was another matter; but Remus wasn't so sure that James was capable of seriously liking _anyone_ that much who wasn't Sirius. Maybe when he was older. Right now James was still in that place where you had mates, and then you had girls. Remus would bet he'd love it if Lily came along with them to Hogsmeade and spent hours with them in Zonko's, but for what?

"Are you saying you don't like Evans?" James asked, brow furrowed, because honestly, he always missed the point.

And then Sirius shattered all of Remus' expectations.

"Yes, mate," he said. "That's exactly what we're saying."

Remus swiveled his head to stare at him. So did Peter—but his eyes weren't round. His face was surprised, but Remus could practically _see_ the gears churning.

James stared most of all.

"Padfoot?" he said, like he couldn't believe it.

"How the hell am I supposed to like a bird who treats you like you're just any old arsehole on the street?" Sirius asked, his expression hard. "A girl who chooses _Snivellus Snape_ , the _Death Eater_ , over _you_? How, Prongs?"

"Wh. . . " James blinked rapidly a few times. "But—Snape's done something to her—that curse—"

"Snape healed her, James," Remus said, keeping his hands on his knees, not buried in his hair and pulling it out at the roots.

"Yes," said Peter, with unexpected assurance. "I saw it. I was the one who told Dumbledore. That's why he asked Evans to his office during dinner."

Remus felt the bed tilt beneath him. " _What?_ " he said, at the same time Sirius said, "The fuck?"

"You were in detention with McGonagall," Peter said, blinking once rapidly. "Snape set that up—"

"I fucking knew it," Sirius growled, but James' attention was all on Peter.

"Go on, Wormtail," he said encouragingly, sitting up straight.

"But I knew you'd want to know what he was up to," said Peter, a veneer of satisfaction filming his face, "so I changed into a rat and followed them. Well, I tried, but Snape did something so I couldn't get too near them; at some point, I just couldn't go any further into the forest after them, either as me or as a rat. So I waited for a bit. . . after a long time, Evans came running past me, and then an even longer time later Snape came out, too, with a cauldron and all this stuff. I followed him back into the school—by the way, he's sleeping somewhere down the disused corridor, but he's got it warded so that not even rats can get through, for some reason—"

Remus was so thankful everyone was looking at Peter, because his face would have given away his secret like nothing else.

"—but anyway, he's down there."

"How do you know it was a cure if you couldn't get to the place he'd done magic?" Sirius demanded.

"Evans is better," Peter said simply. "Before I saw them coming out of the forest, she smelled all wrong; I could tell, when I was a rat. But since she left the forest, she's just smelled normal again."

"Wrong how?"

"I can't really explain it. Just . . . wrong. But I know Snape's been doing some kind of Dark magic, because he smells sort of like that. Different, but it's the same _kind_ of scent, like a different sort of perfume. It's even worse today—like he's been taking a bath in it."

"But you told Dumbledore where you'd seen this?"

"Yes. I described the path to it, but said Snape had fixed things so I couldn't get near, and said Evans _looked_ better. I think Dumbledore must have investigated, because he called her to his office, didn't he?"

"Wormtail, you're _brilliant_ ," James half gasped. He leapt off the bed, as if he'd never run into Snape's bad side and wound up with a lump the size of a satsuma on the back of his head. Par for the course with this new, weird Snape—Remus would have thought that, if the opportunity to catch James and Peter— _any_ of them—unawares had presented itself so gift-wrapped like that, James would have been identifiable only by his dental records.

Remus mused on this as James flitted from one side of the room to the other, his words tumbling over each other like Sirius's little cousin Dora, whom Andromeda sent him pictures of at regular intervals, and who was always tripping or knocking something over. (In the most recent photograph, the Tonkses' Christmas tree had taken a tumble with her.)

". . . you'll see, Padfoot," said James, "you'll see. When Evans is no longer under that greasy oik's spell, she'll come around. She's not thinking right. It's Dark magic, Snape's always been in it up to his greasy eyeballs, now he's just worst than ever. She probably wants free, the way she's been crying so much. We've got to help her. You told Dumbledore about thinking Snape's doing Dark magic, didn't you, Wormtail?"

"I couldn't tell him about the smells, James," Peter said, but apologetically. "He can't know I'm a rat, after all."

"But you could tell him you _saw_ Snape doing Dark magic, right?"

"I told him where Snape is sleeping," Peter said. "He's not been going down to the Slytherin dorms; I know. I heard Avery and Mulciber and the others talking about it in the library today."

Remus blinked. What? He stared at Peter, but Peter was paying all his attention to James and Sirius, who had clumped together in the corner made by Peter and Sirius's beds.

"Not in the dorms?" James asked interestedly. "Right, he's probably off doing his Dark spells and plotting to make Evans. . . " He'd bounced onto Peter's bed; now Remus saw the color drain from his face, literally: it was like the time he'd gone to the Muggle hospital where his mum worked and seen bags of blood being injected into people's veins, the red trailing down the IV, leaving behind a grayish, empty plastic.

"Oh Merlin!" James gasped, rocketing off the bed. But he didn't stop there: he flew over to the door, hurled it open, and shot off down the stairwell.

"Where in Fucktopia is he going?" Sirius growled under his breath. He unfolded himself from his bed and followed James in a kind of loping stalk.

Peter turned wide eyes on Remus, and then scurried after.

"You couldn't have made him gay, God," Remus muttered, and jogged down the stairs after them.

Down in the common room, he found James standing at the bottom of the girls' staircase, bellowing up it. Quite a few people were pointing and laughing, and pretty much everyone was watching. Sometimes Remus wondered how many people thought the Marauders were actually really stupid. More than Snape, surely.

"Potter, this isn't a whorehouse," said Felicity Meadowes, appearing in the stairwell and propelling James back into the common room with a sharp jab to his shoulder. "You can't just yell up the stairs for the madam to toss a girl down. Now." She arranged a hot pink shawl around her shoulders and flipped her dark hair to one side. "What's your poison, sailor?"

"I'm looking for Evans," James said immediately. "Is she up there?"

"No." Felicity lifted her eyebrows, in affected surprise. "Do you want to know where she is?"

"Yes!"

"James," Remus started, because he knew that Felicity was going to—

She stretched out her arms, hands flat to the floor and fingers spread, and tilted her head back. Her eyelids fluttered and she rolled her eyes back into her head; a guttural noise gurgled in her throat.

"Now look what you've done, Prongs," Sirius sighed.

"I . . . see. . ." Felicity gasped. "I . . . see . . . !"

Everyone in the common room was watching raptly. Remus thought about checking his watch with a bored air, but Felicity wouldn't see with her eyes rolled back in her skull like that. At least Frank Longbottom was calmly doing an essay in the corner, not paying attention at all.

He didn't even glance up when Felicity gave a strangled scream and clapped a hand to her throat. "My eyes!" she cried. "The horror! The unspeakable—no—I can't—"

She staggered artfully to the side, falling in a graceful drape onto Sirius, who sighed and shoved her back onto her feet. She stumbled, almost tripping on her shawl.

"Well?" James demanded.

Felicity straightened her shawl with a filthy look. "Don't talk to me, Potter," she said. "Because of you and your stupid questions, my soul's just been shaken to its foundations. I've just had years shaved off my life. My grandchildren have got a few white hairs—"

"What for?" James was practically vibrating.

"From the soul-shattering shock of having to see Lily Evans shagging Snape," Felicity said, brutally offhand. Half the common room gasped, several girls squealed, and Clive Potter-Pirbright entertained his neighbors with virtuoso retching noises.

James went white to the lips, and then tinged an indelicate shade of green. Now that, Remus thought, was how a dying duck in a thunderstorm looked like.

"Thanks, Felicity," he told her as Sirius grabbed the human statue that had once been James and hauled him back into the stairwell. "Always a treat to talk to you. I bet your psychiatrist thinks so, too."

"Aren't you cute, Loopy," Felicity purred, wiggling her fingers at him. "Shall I give you a reading, free of charge?"

"I thought this wasn't a whorehouse?" he said, and pulled open the door to the boys' stairwell.

James came hurtling out and crashed into him, bashing their heads together. Remus staggered back, stars exploding across his eyes; he heard squishy thuds that sounded like two people falling over each other. When his eyes cleared, he saw Peter lying dazed on the floor and a James-shaped outline of dust hovering in the air. Behind him, the portrait hole banged shut.

"He's gone for that disused corridor," Sirius said, stepping over Peter. "Fucking knight in shining armor."

He strode off after James, leaving Remus to help Peter up and the both of them to run after. Peter's face was excited and apprehensive, but Remus felt like he was rushing off to prevent a murder.

Whether it would be James's or Snape's, he couldn't say.

* * *

 

Lily darted along behind Severus, keeping her eyes fixed on his back, and not only because she didn't know the route he was taking. Dinner was over, and occasional brushes with the main corridors through these back ways filled Lily's ears with chatter. Severus had to know she was following him, especially since she was forced to get out her wand and produce a Lumos to keep from tripping and breaking her neck, but he said nothing, nor did he turn around, ever.

The thought flitted through her mind that to spend a day in the castle with him, everyone else gone, and him showing her through its heart and veins, could be really fascinating.

She heard the scraping of stone ahead and saw her Lumos-patched shadow-darkness blotted up ahead by a suggestion of silver; then by Severus shimmering out of sight. Putting on a burst of speed, she stumbled out into a musty-smelling, chilly corridor, lit only by a shaft of gibbous moonlight falling in through a series of diamond-paned windows on high, and realized they were back inside the disused corridor that led to his tower.

Squinting, she turned to point the Lumos up the corridor, to find him, and almost jabbed him in the chin with her wand. She yelped and dropped her wand; the Lumos winked out with a clatter, leaving the space around them lit only by the patches of moonlight on the dusty floor.

"Well?" Severus said. "What do you want?"

Any attempts Lily had crafted of a carefully reasoned argument, impassioned without letting her temper get the better of her, flashed out like the Lumos she had dropped.

"What do I want?" she repeated. "Oh, do you want to know, then?"

"Have I ever asked any question just to be _polite_?"

"I may not have been around for the past twenty-two years, but I'm going to hazard Probably Bloody Not. What I want is for you to stop being a git!"

"I presume you have a large acquaintance with gittishness," he said without missing a beat. She couldn't see his face very well, only a sliver of it which the moonlight rose out of the darkness, but she would bet his expression was just as in-control and sardonic as his voice.

"You bet I do," she retorted. "Years being friends with you, and then James and them, and now you again! You're all gits! And you know what, there may only be one of you, but you excel in being a git, more than the four of them put together!"

"I'm flattered you think so well of me," he said, as if this summation of his git-ery had no effect on him whatsoever.

"Well, here's a news flash for you, I do think well of you! I'm _trying_ to get you to think well of me! But you won't ever bloody tell me what's wrong, and then you just—push me away and walk all over me. I'm _not_ as clever as you, Sev, I can't figure out what you're thinking—"

"Of course you can't," Severus said, as if she were a total fathead for thinking otherwise. "I was a _double-agent_ for more years than you were nancing about in the Order. The Dark Lord may have killed me, but he killed me thinking I was bloody well on his side."

"I didn't nance about in the Order!" she said, insulted enough to be driven off her material point. A few of the more intelligent nodules in her brain pointed out that this may have been his intent.

"I'm hard-pressed to figure out what you did do, since you're as alert as a concussed kitten. _Potter_ had more peripheral awareness than you do."

"I told you, I invented—that's not the point! I don't care if you thought I nanced or not, I don't care about the way the stupid bloody war was, I care about _right now_. And right now you're—acting like you hate me." The end of that sentence came out sounding very small.

"I don't hate you," he said, and if his tone wasn't dismissive, it wasn't encouraging, either. It was—closed-off. Completely.

"Then quit _acting_ like it. Please?" she hadn't meant to blurt out the 'please,' but she kept going. "I want us to be friends again. That's been the _only_ good thing about having to come back and—do this all over again. I'm so, _so_ sorry I ran off after—"

"You wouldn't have done anything else," he said, not _quite_ harsh. "It was a _Dark curse_ , Lily. You weren't thinking straight."

"But—"

"I'll thank you to allow me a tolerable comprehension of the way Dark magic works."

"You didn't run off when I took Contrapasso off you."

"No, I trashed the room and threatened the Healers with evisceration if they didn't find you." She thought she saw his lip curl.

"But. . . why'd I run off, then?"

Severus sighed. It was on the tip of Lily's tongue to tell him he was inconsistent: for years he tried to badger into learning more about Dark magic, and now he was annoyed to have to explain it to her.

"Because Dark magic _messes up the way you think._ You didn't think I meant it affected only the caster, do you? The principle is the same: mind-control during casting also helps distance you as a victim. You have no distance; you have no experience keeping one part of your mind elevated above your emotional impulses. If you'd stayed and fussed over me, it would have meant I hadn't got the spell off you."

"But . . . then why were you so upset and . . . and angry?"

"Because I had just bloody done a high-level Dark cure. I'm always angry; I'm simply better at sublimating it normally."

"You're always in a pretty dreadful temper," Lily said. "For a regular person, I mean."

"That is because I'm _always angry_. I am simply not showing _how_ angry I am."

Lily blinked. The horrible thing was, she had no trouble believing that of him. You only had to see him in a moment when control had lapsed to sense those feelings went fathoms deep beneath the surface. . .

"That's . . . Jesus, Sev, how do you not explode?"

"The same way I don't let Dark magic drive me mad," he said, flat and sneering at the same time. "I _maintain_ _control_."

With an uncharacteristic flash of insight, Lily realized that being back here, like this, had to be the absolute most unforgiving test of his control. Every single second it would be tested. A normal person would be chafing; Severus stood a mile-high in pent-up aggression.

"I've been trying to think of ways to get James and the others to back off," she said. It came out more timidly than she'd intended.

Severus snorted, like a tiger clearing its throat of an antelope's bone. "I think you'd have to behead either them or me."

Lily felt that agreeing to that would be courting fatalism. "What if we just told them the truth?"

In the murky shadows, she could just make out him staring hard at her. "The _truth_?"

"You know . . . that we're . . . well, from the future. Basically."

"Absolutely not," he said with such vehemence that she almost winced.

"Why not? We'll never get them to back off just by reasoning with them, but if we tell them—"

"Tell a bunch of fatheaded Gryffindors who can barely keep their own secrets, which would severely threaten their liberty if released, that I know enough about the future to jeopardize a war?"

"But—"

"Pettigrew becomes a Death Eater," Severus hissed. She had a vision of him grabbing her tie and hauling her forward until they were pressed nose to nose, but he kept his hands folded tight across his chest. "Whether he's already approached a sponsor I cannot say, but the seed of rebellion is already there; I assure you. I know the signs. If we hand him the intelligence that I am in possession of information that could turn the tide of the war in Dumbledore's favor, it will be the greatest gift anyone could possibly give him. He would rocket into the Dark Lord's good graces to an extent you couldn't imagine. It would _make him for life_. The most we could hope for is that the excitement would make him explode."

Lily swallowed. Before she could say anything, however, Severus went on:

"And Dumbledore would be sure to get wind of it, if he hasn't already. No, on second thought, he doesn't know, or he'd have acted. He's forming theories, but he hasn't found one that suits the facts yet. He will, however."

"But you know so much about the war," she said, a pleading tone creeping into her voice without her permission. "You could help him—Dumbledore, I mean. And then, if you were on our side, James and the others would see . . . "

"Dumbledore would want me as a spy," Severus said, his voice low and cold, so cold she felt a chill in the pit of her stomach. A vision rose unbidden in her mind, of Severus kneeling in front of Dumbledore in his office; and then in front of Voldemort, with his red-tinted eyes. . .

"Information," Severus was saying to her now, "is all well and good, but he'd want to be certain that Voldemort didn't render my information obsolete. I have put myself through that twice before. I'm through with it."

Lily opened her mouth . . . and then found she had nothing to say. The ether of her thoughts bubbled, but produced nothing useful; nothing but the thought _Sev spied for as long as Harry was alive and died to get here, and then he almost died again trying not to be a Death Eater_. . .

A light winked on in her head, like the light in a house far down a long, dark road. She could see the crossroads within herself, the past laid beneath the present, like a new layer of asphalt put down to cover the old potholes and ruts. She could hear the reply of the person she had been; the reply that was even now on the tip of her tongue: _But we have to fight! We have to do everything we can, Severus, and we know so much, we can help, you said it yourself, we could turn the tide of the war._

But the words stayed in her mouth, unsaid, because the Lily who stood in the dusty, disused corridor was _seeing_ something. She saw that Severus _had_ given everything to the war, twice, _had_ done everything he could, and died. She didn't know everything had happened to him, but she didn't need to know what had happened, because she saw the result. She'd seen it in the tower only yesterday, when the depth of his vulnerability had transformed into cruelty.

She had seen the beginning of it years ago, on a sunny day beside a tree and a lake.

And she'd turned away from it.

The things she saw transformed to understanding and layered over the ghosts of her convictions, and their path stretched into the future.

"What are we going to do, then?" she whispered.

Severus didn't answer for a long time. With each second that lapsed in silence, she could feel her heart beating louder, pulsing in her fingertips, her temples, her ears.

"What you do is something you will decide for yourself," he said. "I, however, am leaving."

Her blood seemed suddenly gone, as if Vanished from her veins.

"Leaving?" The voice was so small, it almost didn't sound like hers.

"Yes." She couldn't make out his face at all. Even his voice told her nothing; gray, shadowed. "It was foolish of me to suppose I could ever come back here. At least now I know. It will be better for everyone, myself included, once I am gone."

"But . . . you can't leave," she said, still in that tiny voice.

_What will I do without you?_

She blinked as the thought appeared in her mind, like a Lumos, and then instead of passing through as most thoughts did, leaving behind only imprints, this one remained, as bright and glowing as wand-light.

"I've taken care of matters," Severus was saying, as she simply stood there, that thought filling her head with its quiet light. "You won't need to fear any retaliation or random malice from any ambitious Slytherins—or any students, for that matter—but I won't tell you anything more in case Dumbledore—"

Behind Lily, there was the sound of something solid crashing into a thick piece of wood. Severus broke off, and they both heard:

" _snape!_ " It was muffled through the solid oak of the door, but that was definitely James's voice. " _we know you're in there!_ "

"Did he ever come up with any more creative ambushes?" Severus sneered, refined in his contempt.

" _we know you've got evans in there!_ "

"There's your cue," said Severus, turning to go.

Her lips moved: _No_ —

"Sev—" Her hand shot out and her fingers curled in the curve of his elbow.

" _open this door, snape!_ "

She heard the muffled sounds of some kind of scuffle on the other side of the door, but it was like she'd sunk into Severus's trick of dividing the mind: one part of her knew that was going on, but the other was fully concentrated on what she could see of Severus in that dark, dimly lit corridor, where the air was filled with dust and her throat with her heart, and her heart with the conviction that she had to get this right, even though she couldn't see where to step and didn't know the right words to say.

"Please don't go," she said. The plea covered both his leaving the corridor in that small instance and the school in the larger. . . and in her life, the biggest of all. Because the one certainty that she did possess was that if Severus left the school, she would probably never see him again.

Something exploded against the wooden door behind her, but the door didn't budge. She smelled the acrid tang of spell-smoke, but she didn't turn to check.

Severus stood facing away from her for a moment longer. Then he turned. . . her heart leapt, but whether with adrenaline or relief, she didn't know . . .

. . . and then he walked past her, over to the door, and swung it open.

When the torchlight washed into their side of the corridor, spotting the surroundings with color, Lily couldn't help the shade of a feeling that she had lost something.

There was a large, sooty splotch on the pockmarked wood of the door. Severus looked at it. "Destroying school property, Potter?" he asked. "Not even skillfully. Tsk."

"You!" James looked almost _maddened_. The sight of his perpetually cheerful face stark white and gripped with something like fear was startling, even unnerving.

Lily stepped up to Sev's shoulder to see better into the corridor, although, like him, she stayed on this side of the threshold. "What's happened?" she asked, half-fearful someone had hit James with Dark magic. Not unlikely, in this school.

"Evans!" James gasped. He hurled himself at the doorway—

There was an actinic flash of light, and he was flung off his feet, skidding down the corridor a few paces and thudding to a stop.

"I told you it was warded, Prongs!" Peter said fretfully, as Remus bent to help him up. He needn't have wasted the energy, though: in a second, James was back on his feet under his own power, his hair wilder than ever.

"Will someone tell me what the hell happened?" Lily asked, startled. "Remus?"

"Well, on top of a load of other things," Remus said, in an even-toned rush, as if he wanted to get this out as fast as possible before he was cut off, but wanted everyone to keep calm, "Felicity Meadowes."

Lily groaned. "That meddlesome cow—"

"Give Evans back," James gasped. "We know you're using Dark magic on her, Snape, we know—"

"Lily is a free agent," Severus said. His tone was dismissive, but contempt was woven through it, and boredom, so that with a very subtle turn, the insult was maximized. "If she wants to go with you, she may go. If she wants to remain here, she may remain. If she wishes to backpack through the Swiss Alps, she may do that as well."

"Not during January," Lily said. She tried to tamp down on her frustration with James and his crusade to save her from someone she didn't need saving from. "What are you on about, Sev's using Dark magic on me? I told you that spell wasn't Sev's, and it's gone now, anyway—"

"Yeah, he took that one off," James said aggressively, "but he put another one on you, we know it!"

" _You_ know it, Prongs," Sirius interrupted. Lily jumped; she hadn't noticed he was there. He was standing in plain sight, but her attention had been filled with James's contorted face and the barely-there presence of Sev beside her, as though he could reduce his mass as skillfully as he could make himself take up three times the space of any normal person.

"Prongs has got some cracked theory that Snivellus used some Dark magic voodoo on you to get you to follow him around instead of the other way round," Sirius said, looking at Lily with his own kind of bored contempt. She blinked. "He just doesn't want to admit that he's wasted the past year or so thinking you're worth a damn."

For a moment, Lily was totally taken aback. She'd never got on too well with Sirius and always suspected he hadn't much liked her, but he'd never said anything— _mean_ to her before. If she'd pretended to be affectionate, he'd gone along with it.

"Padfoot!" James cried, rounding on him. "Don't talk like that to her! She's not in her right mind—"

"She may not ever be in her right fucking mind," Sirius went on, brutally firm, "but she's not the victim of some Dark bloody curse, Prongs."

"I think we should all go our separate ways and talk about this in the morning," Remus tried. His expression and voice were attempts at calm, but he was watching all four of them—Lily, Sirius, James, even Severus—with apprehensive wariness.

Lily found her own gaze falling on Peter. _His_ expression as he watched everyone fight was almost avaricious . . .

"No," James said forcefully, bringing Lily's attention back to him. (She saw Remus sigh, an inaudible slump of the shoulders.) "I'm getting Evans back _right now_ , Moony. Padfoot, I don't know what your problem is—"

"My problem is that you're driving yourself mad over a girl who picks Death Eater shit over you!"

"You know," Lily said, her temper flaring, heat firing into her cheeks, "I was wondering if you could explain something to me—any one of you."

"Yes, what?" Remus asked quickly, his eyes darting between Lily-and-Severus and James-and-Sirius, who were glaring at each other to varying degrees. Sirius had an almost . . . _ugly_ look on his face.

"Your map," she said, narrowing her eyes, "the one that shows you the school. Did you ever use it to ambush Severus?"

Severus, who had been silent and still, suddenly trod hard on her foot.

"Ow! What?" she hissed.

"I thought you would have learned," he hissed back, so none of the four boys in the hall could hear him, "that I can fight my _own bloody battles_."

Lily felt her cheeks burning still. "You are such a—a _bloke_ —"

"So what if we did?" Sirius asked dismissively, his stance radiating bored unconcern.

His callousness actually shocked her. "That's low, is what!" she cried, feeling her face burn even hotter with something that felt like shame. "How _could_ you?"

"Don't make me Silence you," Severus said in a low voice, with a glare that would have put the fear of God into anyone but his mother, and possibly Voldemort.

"But—" she started, only to have her voice swallowed by Sirius's:

"Do you fucking see, Prongs? She's out of her mind—"

"Because she's been cursed!"

"And what if it's not curse!" Sirius shouted. "What if that's what she really wants! Will you get a fucking clue then, Prongs?"

"Sssht!" Remus suddenly hissed. Lily didn't understand why—

Until a dark shape whisked around the corner and passed into the torchlight:

Professor McGonagall.

"Twenty-five points from Gryffindor, Mr Black," she said sharply, "for language. The rest of you"—she swished to a stop on the periphery of the divided four and dealt them a comprehensive look of borderline disapproval—"will report to the Headmaster's office."

"We weren't doing anything!" Peter protested. "Please, Professor, it was all Snape—"

"It _was not_!" Lily flared. Beside her, Severus let out an almost inaudible sigh.

"Miss Evans, Mr Pettigrew, please," said McGonagall, her voice so crisp it was almost a snap. "The constant fighting the lot of you perpetrate can be dealt with later. This is on a different matter. The Headmaster has requested to see you four"—she eyed the Marauders over the rims of her spectacles—"and Mr Snape. Immediately. You will all come along with me, if you please."

Remus, Lily noted, went white to the gills. The others looked varying degrees of hopeful yet frustrated, disgusted, and anxious, but Remus looked like a man who'd just seen his own gallows erected. So he knew what this was about? But what did it have to do with Sev?

"Miss Evans," said McGonagall, "you will report back to Gryffindor tower."

"What?" Lily blurted. "But I want to come too."

"I'm afraid that hardly matters, Miss Evans," McGonagall said, as though mildly offended Lily would think otherwise. "This has nothing to do with you. Come along, the five of you. No fighting—that means wands _and_ insults _and_ fisticuffs."

Lily jumped when she felt a light pressure on her elbow—barely there; only the weight of a hummingbird; but she'd _felt_ it. And she couldn't imagine Severus accidentally brushing against her as he shimmered out of the doorway. He'd touched her on purpose.

It was a funny, tiny thing to make your heart lift like a bird whose broken wing had finally healed. She watched him glide in the wake of the others down the corridor, feeling a disproportionate sense of lightness, of almost hope—

Then at the turning, he glanced back over his shoulder. Their eyes connected, only for a moment; she felt the hope flare into joy, like a firecracker lit, as his gaze lingered for a moment longer—

And then they were all around the corner and out of sight.

 _It'll be all right_ , she thought, lightheaded with relief. _Whatever it is. Severus is clever, he'll take care of it._

But she wasn't going to go sit in Gryffindor tower with that assurance, like a good girl. She supposed she wasn't a good girl, really.

Lucky for her, she knew a secret way in and out of the Headmaster's tower. A little-known passage Dumbledore had acquainted her with during her war-time visits.

She closed the door to the disused corridor behind her, and ran. She needed to hurry if she didn't want to miss too much.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue below is cited verbatim from p. 673 - 674 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Scholastic edition, 2007.

The secret passageway into the Headmaster's tower brought her to one of its two entrances, the one concealed behind one of the bookcases. The other entry-point was in the Headmaster's private rooms, but the bookshelf-spot gave you access to the study. A small panel could be slid out, to allow you to hear what was going on in the room beyond. It flashed into Lily's head to wonder whether Dumbledore had ever stood here observing the student—or Order member?—who sat waiting for him in his office.

She had to reach up to slide the panel back, because it was built for Dumbledore's eye-level, and he was more than a head taller. She wouldn't be able to see into the room, but she could hear—

Sirius's voice. The memory of his face in the corridor, harsh with darker emotion— distaste, almost disgust—hurt more than she'd have thought it would.

" . . . why we're even here."

"I know," Remus said, his voice thin and pale. He sounded like he might about to be sick.

"You know? How?" Sirius still. Lily could hear little whimpers that sounded like Peter breathing, and the muffled footfalls of someone pacing up and down the perimeter of the room. "Wait." She could practically _hear_ Sirius's eyes narrowing. "Wait just a minute. Is this about Snivellus? Something he did to your eyes?"

"Padfoot—" Remus started, but Sirius kept going, riding roughshod over his words. Severus, she decided, must not be in the room; Dumbledore must have separated them, taken Sev somewhere else—she thought of Severus saying " _He'll have his theories_ " and her heart jolted, but Sirius's profanity was too hard to tune out:

". . . why that greasy shit healed you, and you got a funny expression on your face—now here we are, called up to see Dumbledore, cozy as a bunch of clams, and Snape too, when we haven't even done anything to the cocksucker, and now you're saying you _know why we're here_. What did he do, Moony?"

Lily realized she was holding her breath. The rustling scrapes of the pacing person stopped; she heard James say quietly, near to the bookcase, "Moony? It's okay. You can tell us, if you know something."

"I know." Remus's breathing was audible. "I know." He breathed a few times more. "Snape—submitted—information to the MLE about . . . three illegal Animagi."

Peter squeaked. Lily felt her eyes go wide.

"That piece of FUCKING—" Sirius started.

"Merlin," James said. "Moony, how did you—did he _tell_ you?"

"Yes," Remus said hoarsely.

"And you didn't say anything?" Sirius half-roared. "You didn't TELL US?"

"What would have happened, if I told you? Oh, I know, I've got six years of data, well, five and a half, all right—you'd have gone after him and done something horrible, just like you did the last time he tried to get us expelled! Because APPARENTLY, trying to get us thrown out of school is an offense that needs answering with _murder_!"

The words poured into the shocked silence in a torrent, Remus's voice shaking almost out of control, filled with fury and helplessness; not panicked but harsh, like someone who'd been burnt to the end of his rope. Lily's head spun. Murder? Expulsion? What was he talking about?

"I apologized for that—" Sirius snarled.

"Moony," James started, but Remus ignored him. Judging by the tightly strung emotion in his voice, he might not even have heard.

"You apologized to me, not to Snape, and you still didn't understand, you still _don't_ understand, what you really ought to have apologized _for_. You sent Snape to get mauled by a werewolf—"

Lily pressed her wand-free hand over her mouth to avoid making any noise.

"—by _me_ , and you don't even understand what that means!"

"I understand that if Prongs hadn't saved his worthless hide at the eleventh hour, we'd have had one less fucking Death Eater walking around this school." Sirius's voice was dark, menacing. Lily's heart was beating wildly, so wildly.

"But that's _killing_ , Padfoot," James said, troubled but quiet; she thought _Thank God you get that, at least—_ "We've gone over this—"

"Yeah, we have, and you lot still don't get it. You live in this happy world, Prongs, where everything's going to turn out all right if we all just stick together and we're mates forever, but that's not the way it works. Death Eaters are real, and they want to kill people, innocent people. You put a Death Eater down, you're saving innocent lives. That's the way it fucking works. That's the way war works, and war is coming. I know this, even if you lot don't."

"But we're not supposed to kill them," James argued; and Lily was thankful, so thankful, that he, at least, understood this. "Not unless there's absolutely no choice at all—"

"And how many people will Snape and those other sick bastards have killed before we've _got no choice_ , Prongs? How many people will have died? Maybe Evans, you seem to care about that—"

"If you want to turn yourself into a monster by killing someone else"—Remus's voice was shaking—"that's _your_ decision—if I decide I want to do it, or James, or Peter, that's our own decision in our own time—but you didn't give me a choice before you used me. You almost turned me into a monster, you made me into a tool, and whether I'm a monster or a tool, I'm still not human. Do you understand what that means? I don't have a choice, when I'm like that! I would give anything to have a choice, anything in the world—you're supposed to protect me from making the wrong one, when I'm not right, when I can't control myself, but you _almost made me hurt someone_. I thought I could trust you to make sure I never did that! If I couldn't trust myself, and I know I can't, I thought I could trust the three of _you_!"

Silence dropped into the room like a fifth presence. Lily felt two trails of wetness on her face, from either eye. This was how Remus knew so much about feeling betrayed, so much about resenting the person you told yourself you could trust.

None of them spoke. She could hear Remus breathing heavily. She had to keep her hand pressed over her mouth, in case any sound escaped her.

How could she have missed this? How could it have been kept from her, so entirely. . . ?

_Perhaps easily, if you weren't looking for it. . ._

" _There's something weird about that Lupin . . . where does he keep going?"_

" _He's ill. They say he's ill."_

" _Every night at the full moon?"_

" _I know your theory. . . you're being really ungrateful. I heard what happened the other night. You went sneaking down that tunnel by the Whompling Willow, and James Potter saved you from whatever's down there . . ."_

_You're being really ungrateful—_

She felt sick. The urge to cry _I didn't know!_ rose into her throat, but she choked it back, and not only because they couldn't know she was there, she couldn't face them, not right now; not in the direct wake of this, like footprints pressed into the wet sand of a receding wave.

What if Sirius had succeeded? What if Sev had really been killed?

The walls and floor felt like they were shifting around her as if she stood on a rocking boat in the water. If Severus had died back then. . . if he had . . .

Then the study door clicked open and Dumbledore's voice threaded into the room.

"I apologize for keeping you waiting," he said, his voice mild and calm and gentle. "Ah," he said after a beat. "It seems I've interrupted a tense moment. Would you like me to leave you a while longer?"

"No sir," said James. "We're fine for now, sir. Did you find Snape?"

Lily's heart jolted anew; her eyes snapped open, filling with the darkness inside the passageway. Find Severus?

"Alas, no," said Dumbledore. "He has evaded us for the present. I imagine he's managed to get quite far afield by now."

The touch on her elbow . . . the looking back as he turned the corner. . .

Oh . . .

"He's gone to join Voldemort," James said with utter certainty.

He hadn't been giving her hope. . .

"Do you think so?" asked Dumbledore as he crossed the office.

He had been saying goodbye.

"I find myself less convinced. However, I find it would be useless to speculate at present. We cannot make bricks without clay. I believe we should rather concentrate on the matter at hand. I've asked to speak with you because an anonymous source recently filed intelligence with the MLE regarding Mr Black, Mr Potter, and Mr Pettigrew . . . "

Lily leaned hard on the hand she'd pressed against the wall earlier, blind and deaf in the tumult of her emotions and the darkness of the passage. Severus had taken advantage of her absence to get away, to leave Hogwarts . . .

_No . . . he can't be gone—_

The stone was cold and rough beneath her palm. Her breath was thick and painful in her lungs and throat, as if a weight pressed on her chest, the weight of the castle.

She had wondered—God, was it only hours ago?—how she could possibly reconcile the twin forces of James and Severus. But now—now—she understood that she couldn't. Maybe if they had been different people, if they'd led different lives—but they were who they were, all of them, and this was the life they had built from their choices.

She couldn't see what was in front of her. Her thoughts were tangled and impenetrable, like a jungle. She tried to steady her breathing, just to let something, anything, any thought, any solution, rise to the fore, to tell her what to do.

Severus was gone. He couldn't help her understand how to get free of this.

Breathe . . . breathe . . . let it go . . . just breathe . . .

When she let her thoughts settle, let her rapid, feverish imaginings sink into the jungle of her mind, one question detached itself from the rest and rose above everything else:

_How will I find him?_

For a few moments, she thought nothing else. She simply let her breath fill the space around her.

Life was about choices. And changes.

She glanced over her shoulder, at the patch of light on the wall above her that opened onto the Headmaster's study. She could still hear them quietly talking, too softly to distinguish individual voices, but she didn't need to. In that room were five of the people she'd cared most about. That she still cared about, even though confusion and pain now threaded through it. Because like Remus had said and Severus had already proved, the bonds you forged with your heart were always going to be there, even when your understanding had tangled and unravelled. The heart remembered better than the head.

Her throat was too thick for her even to whisper, but there were no words she could think of to say, even to the shadows around her.

She turned and walked into the darkness, lit only by the starlight glow of her Lumos.

* * *

 

Not wanting to run the risk of anyone seeing her leave, she left everything behind and followed the Headmaster's secret passage down to the ground floor, and then through the passageway that dipped underneath the earth. The passage decanted her deep into the thick undergrowth of the Forbidden Forest, from which you could find a footpath that led to a free-standing gate, a controlled gap in the wards, which opened to the right combination of spells. At least, that's how it _had_ worked.

She was still within the Hogwarts' environs, unable to Apparate, and Dumbledore probably hadn't kept the spells on the gate the same for five years running. In fact, she _hoped_ he hadn't; that wouldn't say much for security. But she might as well see, because the other alternative was beating a path through the forest in the dark.

And she wasn't sure who she could trust anymore. Certainly not her own judgment.

Just _how_ _much_ had she been wrong about? What _else_?

The gate could only be found by those who had been shown where to find it, but she stumbled across it within five minutes. As she had thought, however, the unlocking spells didn't work. They fizzled into nothing, glimmers of colored magic glaring in the darkness.

All right; so that was one option down. She tried not to panic at the thought of Severus getting further and further away. _Focus, Lily. You can't get anything done by losing your head. Not that it's your best asset, in any case,_ she added, the taste of her remorse bitter in her mouth.

Shaking these thoughts to the back of her mind, she focused on focusing. What was her next best bet?

The Shrieking Shack. Its name caused her heart to spike with new bitterness, but her head focused on the fact that the path ran from the Hogwarts grounds to the outskirts of Hogsmeade, beyond the wards. Remus clearly wouldn't be there tonight, and it was close to the forest. Minimal visibility.

And _then_ she could try to find an extremely wily double-agent who didn't want to be found. By anyone.

Maybe least of all by her.

Wand in hand, voice shaky but forceful, she grit out, " _Point me_ ," and turned until she was facing directly west. She could trek to the perimeter of the forest, and then along the edge of the trees to the Whomping Willow.

The trees' foliage folded blackly around her, dissecting the moonlight into tiny pieces that scattered across the snow-flecked earth at her feet. She wished she'd had the opportunity to get her cloak, but her transfigured school tie would have to do.

The forest was utterly silent. She'd never really ventured inside it, in the winter. She supposed all the birds would have flown south. Their absence made the forest seem . . . eerie. Lifeless. She hoped she wouldn't run into any centaurs; she understood they were territorial, at the very least.

And . . . something else was niggling at her . . . but she couldn't remember. Something to do with bacon? . . .

Elsewhere in the forest, a thready howl dissipated into the frozen air.

All the hairs on her body stood up.

_Manticore._

Shit.

What did she remember about manticores? She didn't take Care of Magical Creatures, but she'd read _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_ —how did one defend against a manticore? If only she had Sev's memory—if only she wasn't a moron who forgot potentially life-saving information—or a semi-intelligent person who understood _anything_ —

 _You'd better hope you're not the only other living thing in the forest,_ said her Survival Instinct. _Otherwise, when it's hungry, you know where it's going to be . . . and you'll know it's going to be hungry . . ._

Out of the forest—that was the first goal.

She picked up her pace, keeping due west, and tried to calm herself by thinking of strategies to deal with any manticores, singular or plural, that showed up. They were highly resistant to spells, weren't they? Blinding it might work, or possibly sticking its paws to the ground—a Protego could knock it off-balance—

She stumbled to a halt, her heart hammering, her senses on alert, because something was crashing in the trees off to her left. Straining her ears, listening over the harsh thread of her breath, she heard the sound of—hooves—?

 _Oh_ , she thought, as three centaurs, armed with bows and expressions of fierce disapproval, erupted from the underbrush, their sweaty flanks scattered with the black detritus of snapped branches. Two of them were holding bows knocked with arrows; the third had a spear.

"Another one?" said one with an auburn hide and matching hair. "Where did you come from, little human?"

"It shouldn't be here at all," thundered the second, who reminded her more than a bit of Severus. His hide was black and his pale skin luminous in the moonlight, and there was more than a touch of get-out-of-my-sight-you-vermin in his expression and voice. He carried the spear. "This is our forest."

"Certainly it is receiving its fair share of traffic tonight," said the auburn centaur, not visibly ruffled.

"You should go, young human," said the third, who was dark all over, save for the whites of his eyes. He appeared to be the leader: the Severus-y centaur, who'd been about to retort to the auburn one, fell silent with a sulky kind of air as soon as the third spoke. "This is no safe place for foals."

"Thank you very much," Lily said, being as sumbissive and respectful as she could, "and excuse me, please, but have you seen another human? A boy, about my age, in here? Black hair—"

"Talk to Bane," said the auburn centaur, sounding amused.

"Calfling!" said the Severus-y centaur, whom Lily deduced was Bane. "If I see him again—"

"Be silent now," said the leader, and Bane obediently belted up. "We have no time to behave like flippant children with the beast on the loose. Ronan, escort the young human from the forest, then find us. We go on."

Ronan nodded. The leader and Bane picked up their hooves and cantered back into the underbrush, to a symphony of snapping branches.

"Come along then, little human," said Ronan. "There's a manticore about, and little else for him to eat, at this time of the year."

Lily had to jog to keep up with him. "Thank you," she panted as she ran. "I couldn't remember what hurts a manticore—"

"Spears and arrows," said Ronan. "Not your little bit of wood. I think perhaps you ought to ride—you're making a racket, the beast will be upon us in a trice." He drew to a halt. "Up, then," he said. "But just this once, and no boasting."

"Of—of course." Lily felt extremely awkward, but grateful. She clambered up as best she could, glad she'd thrown her corduroys on underneath her robes that morning for extra warmth.

Ronan brought her to the edge of the forest, drawing up in the shadow of the trees. Beyond their borders, the moonlight glared stark and bright on the snow.

"Erm—Ronan . . . sir?" she asked, as she slid down from his back.

"Young human?" he replied.

"Which . . . do you know which way the boy went?"

"He went east," said Ronan. "Whether he made it wherever he intended is anyone's guess."

"Thank you very much," she said, and took off running along the tree-line, headed for the hulking shape of the willow in the distance.

One stick later, and she was sliding down into the slimy tunnel. The cold down there was harsh enough to be unfriendly, but not as biting as the open air above. She had to walk practically bent double, and at a couple of junctions she was forced to put her wand between her teeth and crawl on her hands and knees. She'd never been down here before. And Remus had to do this every month? Surely there'd been some better way . . .

Severus had come down here once. . .

Tears sprung to her eyes. _Trust._ God—she'd trusted them! And it didn't matter that they'd never done anything to hurt _her_. (All right, except for Peter.) It didn't even matter that Severus had wound up being, at least for a time, everything Sirius had thought, because that wasn't how life _worked_. You weren't justified for pre-emptive punishment by a guess founded on hatred.

And James and Remus, they had known what Sirius had done was wrong; even in the office, they had been disagreeing with him; yet they'd never said anything to her. How could they have kept from her that Severus had been set up, either to die or be cursed for life? And Severus . . . he hadn't told her . . . but he'd _tried_ (in his way) and she hadn't listened, she'd believed the version that seemed to fit: that Severus had been trying to get the dirt on them, and it had backfired, and James had saved him . . . she'd never even wondered why James had been on hand to _do_ the saving before.

A low-hanging root conked her on the forehead. She swore, but then decided it must have been an act of God. She'd been such a—a brat! A— _fuckwit_ , to use one of Sirius's words.

God, Sirius . . . she hadn't known he'd had that . . . _darkness_ in him. Or maybe, she thought, in despair, like everything else around her, she'd seen it, but she just hadn't _noticed._ When people had talked about his family, there'd been such a look on his face . . . and sometimes, on the battlefield . . . she remembered seeing it. But during Order meetings he had been so bright and full of life, making them all forget how terrifying the outside world was, and in the midst of everyone's laughter and the lamplight she had thought she'd just been imagining the other things . . .

She wiped her hand across her face, smearing dirt on her forehead without meaning to.

She felt sick—most of all with herself. All of this stuff had been right under her nose the whole time—the Slytherin stuff, the Death Eater stuff; the way James and Sirius would gang up on Severus, for some kind of lark, or on a pilgrimage to "save" innocent people from him; even Peter's enjoying watching everyone fight. She hadn't known that Sirius had sent Severus down here on purpose, knowing he'd be hurt or worse. She hadn't known they'd used the Map to ambush Severus for years. She hadn't known that the Death Eaters had started at home, encouraged by their parents. She hadn't known that, even had Severus _wanted_ to leave, he'd have become a target for the malicious ambitions of several hundred students. She hadn't known that Dumbledore invented Dark spells, or that James had prevented a _murder_ attempt, and then, with the other three, _covered it up_.

She hadn't known because she _hadn't seen_.

A memory shoved to the front of her confusion with brutal determination. She remembered looking at James with a glimmer of admiration after she'd learned what had happened— _no_ , she thought with fierce despair; _their version_ of what had happened—and he'd grinned and fluffed his hair; just the way he'd done in seventh year, when he'd shown her the Map, and the craftsmanship had been so unique and exquisite, she'd been impressed in spite of herself . . .

How _could_ James have used that Map—have used it, have bragged about the thing to her, _knowing_ she'd once been friends with Sev—ugh! Oh, she could slap him! _And_ Sirius! Had they got under that Cloak, too, or would they have drawn the line at using their recon advantage to corner Sev unawares and then attack him with superior numbers? _God_!

For one wild second, she regretted just leaving without telling them off. If finding Sev hadn't hung in the balance, she'd have regretted it more.

At the moment, the only person she had to tell off was herself. A parade of crystallized, childish stupidities streamed before her eyes. She could remember being so disgusted, sometimes with all of them; James and Sirius would attack, and Severus always fought back with every ounce of viciousness—there had been that spell of his, Sectumsempra, the one that cut ribbons out of his enemies' skin. He'd invented it at the end of the fifth year; it had been one of the things they'd fought so hard about. She hadn't understood how he could have used his ingenuity to make it, and he'd gotten a disturbing look on his face, one that had chilled her and made her feel she didn't know him at all and said, _I have to protect myself._ She'd avoided him for a couple of days after that, trying to figure out what she should do—and then the Incident at the tree had happened, and she had never talked to him again until she'd _died_.

It wasn't just about the Death Eaters. It had _never_ been. Everyone had been cruel to him from the start—at school, at _home_ , at Hogwarts. Severus was always strung on the verge of attack mode, but James and Sirius had _enjoyed_ getting a rise out of him. And not just them; everyone at school . . . more memories bubbled up, like bits of flotsam stirred by the tide: Mary and Felicity would laugh when they heard that James had done this or that to Severus, and the crowds would stand on the sidelines and cheer them on. . .

She wiped her hand across her eyes, and the mud stung. Roots dug into her knees; crumbs of dirt rained down into her hair, and maybe that was a bug crawling down the back of her neck, but she kept going, her breath spiking in her lungs.

It even made her wonder whether James had _ever_ stopped hexing Sev. She'd thought he'd quit in seventh year, when he'd quit hexing other people for a laugh—the death of his mother had matured him a lot, brought those things she had in off moments admired about him to the fore, and all that childish hexing and strutting that had so disgusted her had sunk into the past. But she remembered that time Sev had hexed James's nose off his face—"because he's so concerned with the size of other people's," Peter had reported—and she wondered if those old habits had gone on behind her back, and no one had ever told her. . .

 _Or maybe_ , hissed her inner Dementor, _they thought you already knew and didn't care. Maybe that's what Severus has been thinking all along. Maybe that's why he left you._

The stitch in her side was crippling and her muscles were screaming, especially in her thighs and calves and lower back. When was this bloody tunnel going to _end_?

As if her indignation had been a Summoning Spell, the light up ahead warped, coalescing into a roundish entrance. Thank _God_.

With trembling arms she hoisted herself up into the shack and collapsed onto the dirty, dusty floor. After about two dozen rough breaths, she sat up and looked around.

The place was a _wreck_. Furniture had been savaged, the walls gouged, the floors rent; dust plaster and dirt and wallpaper shreds littered a floor sticky with dark patches that she didn't want to look too closely at. She remembered Remus telling her how before James and the others transformed for him, he used to bite and scratch and tear at himself.

She had a horrible urge to burst into tears. How could they have been so good and kind to Remus and so _monstrous_ to Sev?

On shaky legs, she found a boarded-up window and spelled the nails out so she could wrench the boards away. The drop down to the ground was a bit further than she'd expected, rocketing pain through her heels and ankles, but not injuring her. She was able to skirt around the corner and find Hogsmeade glowing merry and bright in the dark cradle below the horizon.

She scrambled over the makeshift fence and stumbled down the uneven road toward the village.

It was so dark and cold. The gibbous moon glared off the snow and shaded the shadows in deeper, like heavy strokes from a charcoal pen. The trees were stark and black, the same color as the sky, as if it had dipped down and stained the horizon, and the heavy clouds glowed as they parted around the moon, as if its light was so bright it had burned them away.

How could she _contact_ Sev, at least? The Owl Office? If it were closed, she'd break in. She'd leave some money—

Except she didn't have any money. She'd left the school in her robes, with her wand and nothing else. Damn.

Well, she'd break in and pay them later. She needed to send a note on its way to Severus, before he went completely underground. If she could find some way to alert him that . . .

_Oh, I am **such** an idiot._

She stopped in the road and remembered him touching her arm, looking back at her as he turned the corner. She blocked everything else from her mind, everything that had happened before and since that moment, recapturing only its happiness, its hope, and said forcefully, " _Expecto Patronum_!"

Her doe formed glittering in the cold night air, turned in a circle, and shot off northward, moving as fast as a comet.

Lily ran after her.

She skirted around the town, not taking its high street, not wanting to be seen. The last glimpse she'd had of the doe, scintillating on the dark horizon, she'd still been headed due north. Lily would go that way, too. Hopefully, hopefully, Sev would come back . . .

He had to come back. Or else she'd keep going. She'd keep going until he did.

She left the warm glow of high Hogsmeade behind, winding around the back of the cottages that straggled through the wilder countryside into the foothills of the mountain. Eventually she came to a stile at the end of the road and clambered over it, gaining the barren land that stretched along the foot of the mountain.

" _Point me_ ," she told her wand, and it obediently swung north. She followed it, clambering over rocks, until the soft lights of Hogsmeade were all sunk into the distant darkness, and she was alone in the wilderness. The only noise was the wind and the sound of her breath, her footsteps on the cold, barren earth.

The clouds parted again, showing the moon much lower in the sky, and larger. Its silver-white light washed clean across the hulking forms of the rocks, stretching their shadows toward her.

A dark shape bled up from the shadowed crown of a rock some dozen meters ahead of her. Heart leaping into her throat, she froze—

But it wasn't Severus.

It was the manticore.

The moonlight glowed in an aureole around its mane. Her eyes traveled over the hard, black curves and grooves of its stinger-tipped tail. Its eyes burned two orange points in the darkness, like the ends of Sirius's cigarettes that he'd smoked after Regulus died.

The manticore hunched, coiling its muscles—she saw the moonlight glinting along the curve of its haunches—and leapt off the rock.

All of her instincts screaming WHAT ARE YOU DOING, she slammed her eyes shut and yelled, " _Illuminatus_!"

The backs of her eyelids flickered with the blinding storm of light, and the manticore let out a screeching yowl. Snapping her eyes open, Lily saw it batting at its eyes, darting frantically right and left again. But if it could still smell her—

She let off a spell to produce a smoke bomb before realizing she shouldn't have done that; it blocked her sight too effectively, obscuring her from the manticore but also the reverse, leaving her unable to see. But she'd impaired its ability to see her twice, at least; now she needed to put some distance between them. She had to keep it away from the village—but if she could somehow lure it down into a ravine—

She ran to the right, casting a spell to tell her the depth of the land immediately in front of her; a charm she'd found to help the Order canvas unfamiliar terrain in the dark. There—twelve meters ahead, the land made a sharp drop—

She skidded to a halt on the edge, scattering pebbles—they rumbled to the bottom of the ravine, where a frozen river lay static below her, some five to six meters—

The rumbling noise wasn't the pebbles. Apparently the manticore's sense of smell was better than she'd thought.

She flung herself down the side of the ravine, skidding down the steep slope; then more than skidding, as it suddenly knifed straight down, away from her. She crashed onto the hard soil below, scattering rocks, scraping her palms and, it felt, cracking her ankles clean off. Gasping, she rolled to her feet; the manticore's growls were rumbling out of its throat, she could hear it crunching rocks as it navigated down the slope behind her, and she was surprised at how afraid she was, how her whole body was shaking—

She scrambled to the edge of the river and put her foot out on it. The ice cracked but held. The reflex to look over her shoulder struck like a flash of lightning; before she could resist it, she twisted her head to look, through the hair fallen ragged over her eye. The manticore's human face was visible in the moonlight, eyes glowing, teeth bared in a snarl, blood running over its chin—it was gathering itself to leap—its tail was raised high above its head.

Lily flung herself across the river. She felt the rush of air as the stinger whipped above her head, and she slammed onto her stomach on the ice. It cracked beneath her; the water pierced through her clothes to her skin like a badly performed Crucio, pain and shock rocketing along her nerves. She dug her nails into the rocky earth on the other side of the stream and heaved—

Crashing behind her, the sound of a heavy body impacting with ice and water. The manticore's claws raked through her sodden cloak and hauled her back, fingers torn free of the bank—they scored along the back of her thigh, down her calf, four separate, burning trails of startling pain—she cried out—

The manticore screamed, high and inhuman, and suddenly let go.

Someone—human hands—locked around her upper arms and heaved her out of the water. She was shaking, and she clung to them, to the person, who was far too skinny; a far too skinny boy with an iron grip—

"Sev," she gasped.

"I leave the school for an hour and you nearly get yourself eaten, drowned, and frozen to death?" His voice was ten meters tall with fury; his grip was so painfully harsh it was cruel; but he turned her with extreme gentleness so he could see the manticore's claw marks. A second later, a drying spell passed over her, along with a warming charm; she felt like she'd just taken a bath and thrown on clothes fresh out of the dryer.

Her ears echoed with the silence of the mountainside around them: no yowls or rumbles or inhuman screams.

"Sev—the manticore—"

"At the bottom of the river now," he said curtly. "Be quiet so I can see this. It didn't sting you; you'll be fine. Eventually."

She gripped him around the ribs. "I'm sorry," she gasped, "I'm so sorry, I didn't know—"

"Do be quiet and let me concentrate," he said.

Swallowing, she lay her head against his arm. His touches were deft and no-nonsense, a lot like Pomfrey's, but she could feel his heartbeat thundering.

"This _does_ need disinfectant." His tone was very obviously scolding. "We're Apparating to the village. Hold on."

She nodded. Apparition squeezed her; the cold night air became even colder as they streaked through it at the speed of light; then she was staggering to a stop in back of a dark cottage. She would have crashed face-first into the snow if Sev hadn't been holding her up.

Her leg and back hurt, but not badly enough to make her insensate, now that her fear had sank to manageable levels and her clothes were dry. "Sev—" She looked into his face, which was wearing its Calculating Expression as he observed the cottage's back door while unfastening his cloak. The apologies crowded to the tip of her tongue, but she started with: "Dumbledore's looking for you, isn't he?"

"Yes." He lowered her onto a rustic bench the cottage's owner had probably put in so they could enjoy the spring and summers view of the nearby mountain. Dropping his cloak around her shoulders and tugging it into place, he said authoritatively, "You wait here."

"Wh—"

But he nipped into the adjoining backyard, as silent as another shadow joining the rest. Lily gripped his cloak around her and waited.

While logic knew that Severus was too clever to get caught stealing first aid supplies from a cottage in a sleepy wizarding village, where they probably didn't even lock the back door, her nerves refused to go on holiday. They kicked up larks all along her spine the whole time he was gone. When he finally materialized, relief wobbled over her.

"They're out," he said succinctly, and helped her up with a kind of stern gentleness.

"We're both going inside?" she said, a bit alarmed, as he navigated them through the iced-over garden, dormant and crystallized silver in its neat beds.

"They've gone away on holiday," he said. "To the Canary Islands, judging by the literature scattered around the house. Observe," he said, pointing to a stack of post. "All five days old. They've obviously had it held by the owl office until they return. Bread's in the fridge, meat all thrown out, fine layer of dust."

There was a lump in her throat, something almost like happiness but too agonizing. "Nice job, Sherlock."

She let him steer her out of the kitchen to the tiny bathroom. There was a claw-foot bathtub with a toilet practically piled on top of it, and a cabinet set above the sink, which you had to suck your stomach in to get around.

She watched him fiddle with a plain jar of antiseptic ointment with his lit wand stuck between his teeth like a torch. "No lights?"

He removed his wand from his teeth. "If the neighbors see lights on in a house whose owners are supposed to be thousands of miles away, what do you suppose would happen? Hogsmeade mightn't have had any crime in the past half century more salacious than a few stolen root vegetables, but no one's that stupid." He replaced the wand and muttered around it, "Least I 'ope not."

Lily wanted to smile, but her face couldn't manage it. She concentrated on how the cuts on the backs of her legs and thighs and hip were stinging, trickling blood; she could feel it threading in rivulets down to her socks. She hoped she wasn't staining these poor people's floors. "Do I drop trou, then?"

For a moment, he froze. But then he said, with very credible indifference—not looking at her—"You'll have to. There's no point in rubbing this on your corduroys."

Lily slipped his cloak off and draped it over the edge of the tub, following with her itchy school robe, and unbuttoned her trousers, letting them pool on the floor. She felt . . . odd.

Severus maintained a stony silence. She could sense the distance, even though he was literally touching her, spreading the ointment with deft movements along the curve of her spine above the line of her knickers. At first it stung, but then there was only coolness, the pressure of his fingers. She shivered.

He stopped so quickly, it was almost a freeze. "Did that hurt?"

She only shook her head. A moment later, she heard the cadence of his voice performing the healing spell on the wound, and she felt the odd prickles of her skin closing over itself, healing, the natural process of weeks sped up to a couple of seconds.

Sometimes magic was mind-boggling.

Severus moved efficiently down her legs. Lily tried to think distant thoughts. But as soon as she removed herself from the distracting intimacy of the present, the memories of the past stung worse than any ointment, almost as badly as the manticore's claws.

How should she handle this?

"Are we even, then?" she asked quietly as he moved down to her left calf.

He paused for a moment before resuming. "Even?"

"You ran off from the school without saying good-bye. I ran after you and almost became a manticore apertif. I _was_ mad at you for the first, but my powers of deduction tell me you're mad about the second. So does that make us even?"

He didn't say anything, only healed the last gouge. She twisted her head to look down at him; but he was already standing, screwing the lid back onto the ointment jar: _scrapescrapescrape._ His face was back to unfathomable, inscrutable: grown-up spy Sev.

"Don't do that," she said.

"Don't seal ointment jars?" he asked.

 _Git_ , she thought, and wanted to throw her arms around him and burst into tears.

"Don't do that thing with your face," she said.

"My nose is stuck this way."

The sight of his expression settling into sardonic lines that were already deepening in permanence; the way he'd shoved his lank hair across his forehead, pushing it out of his eyes; the imposing curve of his nose—all of it burned into her heart like a brand upon flesh, and a sensation rose with it, as powerfully as pain would follow a real branding, only this was something else—

"Don't," she rasped, "go all—secret-agent-man on me. You don't need to try as hard as you did with Voldemort. I'm not near as clever as him."

"It's too bad," he said, over the sound of water running in the sink as he rinsed the ointment off his hand. "If the Dark Lord had only gone wandering at night all alone and met a hungry manticore, he'd have saved us all a great deal of stress."

Wasn't _that_ the truth. "What happened to the manticore?" she asked. "I thought spells couldn't do much damage to it?" She peered into his pre-lined yet still-youthful face. "And you don't look all backlashy—"

"Don't do that," he said.

"What?"

"Stand around in stranger's bathrooms with your trousers off. I'll be in the kitchen."

He left. She scrambled into her clothes and followed him the two steps into the kitchen, where he was spreading cold butter on a slice of cold bread. The lights were still off, but the moon cut the darkness in bits and pieces, making Severus's hands visible, the knife blade. The table looked like a half-moon, round, the left part in shadow and the right lit.

"These trousers are now rather drafty," she said, and then wondered if she should stop playing at lightness.

He said, "It's your own fault for tusseling with a manticore." She couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or serious.

"Eat this," he said, and shoved two pieces of bread into her hands. He must have hit them with a bit of wand-fire, because they were perfectly toasted, the butter melty. Obediently, she scarfed both pieces, and then found him handing her a snifter of—she sniffed; the scent burned faintly—plum brandy.

"Dutch courage?" she asked.

"You've been in a freezing river and, judging by the abominable state of your clothes, blundering around the Scottish wilderness at night, in the dead of winter. Warming charms aren't the same as human comforts."

He spoke like someone who knew what he was talking about; who remembered all the times he'd had to go without. She sipped the plum brandy and eyed him over the faceted rim of the glass as it burned a fine trail down her throat. She figured Dutch courage could only help her, at this point.

Swallowing its borrowed warmth, she asked, "Where's your plum brandy and your toast?"

"I never blunder, I wasn't in the river, and I stayed well clear of the manticore."

"You're a superhero, all right," she said, and hid her painful smile in her snifter. "You even gave McGonagall the slip, I'm guessing?" And with James and the others there—but she couldn't say their names, not yet, not after what they'd done to the man standing in front of her. . .

"Something like that, yes."

She gathered her borrowed courage and looked him in the eyes. "You were planning that when you left me."

"Yes," he said, unwavering on his own merit. "I was."

She drained her glass and set it on the stone countertop with a soft _clink_.

"I've said it before," she said hoarsely. "I imagine I'll do it again. You're a git."

He picked up the glass and washed it in the sink, dried it, and put it away. After shutting the cabinet door, he smoothed his fingers along the groove in the woodwork.

"And you're supremely foolish," he said without turning. "You were supposed to stay in the bloody school."

"You mean you were planning for me to stay," she said, watching him for any indication as to what he was thinking, even though she knew there wouldn't be any. "Did you _want_ me to stay?"

He dropped his hand to the countertop, but he didn't answer. He didn't turn, either.

"I was certain you'd want to," he said, distant, as if it hardly mattered either way. "I'd made sure it was safe, in case you were wondering. I focused a spell of protection on you. If anyone targets you with intent to harm, the injury returns on them three-fold. I didn't realize it would work on a manticore, but perhaps their human face is more than just a façade."

In spite of the brandy, her stomach tingled with cold. "That's why you've been looking so ill," she realized. "It wasn't just backlash. You were doing other Dark magic, too."

"Yes," he said, finally turning. There was an almost mocking light in his eye, even in the shadows, like he was waiting for her to lay into him.

She tightened her jaw. "Did you combine it with the cure magic?"

"See?" he said, almost softly. "You're not as stupid as you think."

"Yes I am," she said tightly. "And just so you know, I think you're pretty stupid too, in a lot of ways. Not when it comes to fooling guys whose names end in –oldemort, but when it comes to other people—"

Something flashed in his face, so sharp and sudden it was visible even in shadow. "Everyone sees what they want to see," he said harshly, "even the Dark Lord. Even Dumbledore—it doesn't matter how great your intellect; we all see only what we wish."

She breathed through her mouth, trying not to ruin everything by bursting into tears. "I know," she said. "I know. Now I know—that's what I've been doing. For years. I only saw—I don't even know what I saw, because it's seemed so . . . so _wrong_. I'm _so_ sorry, Sev."

It sounded so inadequate. And he just stared at her, his expression too Occluded for her to read. Then he said, "You're rambling. I didn't think you were that much of a lightweight that a little plum brandy would make you delirious—"

"I'm not being delirous, Sev, I'm trying to apologize for being a . . . a fuckwit."

Severus stared some more. "You certainly _sound_ delirious."

"I didn't know," she went on. "About the Shrieking Shack . . . when Sirius . . . I didn't know. How Sirius meant for Remus to. . ." She couldn't say it, but she had to, as if this would be finally admitting it was real. To herself. To him. That she _knew_. "To kill you."

The words crowded into the tiny kitchen and hung there.

Severus somehow managed to draw back without moving in any way; as if he'd drawn back mentally, rather than physically. He didn't say anything.

"Because you followed them around, trying to get them expelled." Tears did sting her eyes then, but she could still see and her voice, although it quavered, didn't give out. "I swear I never knew, Sev, I didn't know—back then—when it happened—I knew something had happened in the Forbidden Forest, but I didn't know they were all in on it, I didn't know it was on purpose, I didn't—"

Severus said, sounding like an out-of-practice psychiatrist, "Lily. You're upsetting yourself."

"No!" She stomped her foot, trying to anchor herself; tears splashed out of her eyes, starting to flow freely. "I didn't know about that, but that's no excuse! What I didn't _know_ isn't, I mean— All this stuff about—" She waved both hands in the air, as if the words were hanging there, invisible, and she needed to touch them to know what to say. "Slytherin, about the Death Eaters, how they really worked, what they've been doing to you, because you're trying to defect—I didn't understand anything, but I thought I knew everything! I'm so, so sorry—"

"If I didn't know better, I'd think someone had hit you with Contrapasso."

"I'd deserve it!"

"You don't deserve to die because you were an idiot," Severus said, in a you're-still-being-an-idiot voice. "No one deserves to die for being pitifully stupid."

An emotion welled in her heart, one that for reasons she didn't understand made her feel desperately happy, almost joyous. "Who are you and what have you done with Severus Snape?"

"He's sick of all the willful idiocy in life and has moved permanently to Greece." His stance altered like he was going to reach out to her—her hope soared—but in the end he stayed put. "Will you let it go if I admit you were as dumb as a brick when you were sixteen?"

She laughed, but since she had tears in her eyes and the thickness of remorse in her throat, it came out as more of a hiccup. "Only if you really mean it."

"You may believe that I do."

More tears leaked out of her eyes, dripping down her face. "I'm so sorry," she whispered.

"If you think I've been any less stupid," he said, "that's its own kind of blind idiocy."

"I was supposed to be your friend." She wiped at her face, but it didn't do much good. "But when did I act like it?"

He gave her a long look. It was unfathomable, aeons deep, making her feel as young as a child gazing into the mirror of eternity.

"I never thought you were perfect," he said.

She looking up from wiping at her tears.

"Or perhaps I did," he said, his voice tingeing with irony, "when I was ten years old. Maybe even when I was fifteen, who bloody knows. But I have since realized that that isn't the point."

"But I'm—" she started.

"Although it's been refreshing, hearing from your own mouth that you were wrong."

She did laugh, but it caught on a sob. "If you want me to grovel some more, I'm in the mood."

"Save it for rainy afternoons," he said.

She laughed again, but the desire faded into a quiet pressure in her heart that she didn't have the space or the control to understand.

"I've been miserable an awful lot since. . . dying," she said. "But right now I'm glad it happened. Really glad."

"I could say it hasn't been entirely without merit."

Lily nodded, and then they were silent. She almost wished this hadn't happened in some stranger's mundane kitchen, but it was better, at least, than going through it out in the cold. When something happened in such a trivial, ordinary place, you knew it was _real_.

"Now," Severus said, "you can go back to the school."

Lily felt the air crystallize around her.

"W-what?"

"Well, what?" He didn't move, but his body's language said that he had pulled away from her somehow. She felt as if she were spinning even further away. "You've confessed and been forgiven. The past has been reconciled. What else is there?"

She looked into his face. Calm, inscrutable, distant. Occluded.

"You're doing it again," she whispered. "The face."

"Lily—"

"You know why I hate that face? It's because when you wear it, you're shutting me out. You're hiding things from me."

"We all hide things," he said, and no emotion flickered where she could see it.

"Am I hiding things from you? Tell me what they are and I'll show them to you."

"I don't know. That's the point of hiding, isn't it? That you don't know what it is you're not seeing?"

"I'll tell you anything you want to know, Sev."

"Fine," he said. "Then, please. What is it you wish for me to do? Because I sure as hell don't know."

It poured out in a rush: "Let me come with you."

"No." As solid and crushing as iron.

"Why not? Because it's _dangerous_?"

"Because you don't know what you're asking." The cruelty was shifting back into his face, like a shadow driven across the earth by the sun. "Come with me, you say. Leave behind your precious four? Your husband? Your future child?"

Her heart flinched as if dealt a blow, but it wasn't the force of surprise. Severus didn't let her gather herself for a reply; he went on, as cruel as before and equally implacable:

"If you leave now, even if you come back, you can't guarantee Potter won't have moved on. Without him, you'll never see your son again."

She started, "I know—"

"Logically"—his tone was brutal, his gaze cruelly unfeeling—"you do. But when you have to really feel it, you will feel differently. I won't be party to your resentment—"

Lily tried to regulate her breathing. "Harry's g-gone." She clenched her cold hands into fists. "As my son, the baby I raised, he's gone. He's . . . gone on, I guess—I don't know. You still remember him, don't you?"

"Yes." His lip curled.

With a heroic effort, she ignored that. "Then wherever we are, we aren't really in the past, because we've changed too much. Time should have altered, right? I've read time theory—if our memories had changed, we'd have experienced some overlap, some realignment. Later it would have straightened out, but we'd have been getting horrible headaches now, and I haven't been. Have you?"

"No."

"Did you ever figure out what could have happened? Where we could be?"

He shook his head, a single movement to either side, curt, almost displeased.

"But things are still different," she insisted. "We can't go back. Even if I married James again, I wouldn't get the same baby—"

"So you're ditching Hogwarts because you've reasoned you won't find your son again?"

" _No_ , you great git," she said, trying to keep her despair out of her voice. "I'm trying to show you that if you're worried about me suddenly having a fit of stupid over this, I've already thought about it. I'm trying to tell you it's all in the past— _all_ of it. We . . . we tried to go back, and we couldn't. You can't . . . it doesn't work that way."

Severus didn't reply. His expression was cold, crystallized, like the garden outside. Emotions and warmth dormant.

How was she supposed to break through that?

"I'm not as wise as Remus," she said, feeling timid and unsteady, as if she were back to standing on the bank of that frozen river at the foot of the mountain. "When Sirius did that—the Shack thing—he hurt Remus worse than you ever hurt me with the . . . with you-know. But Remus tried to forgive him anyway, because it hurt worse not to. I . . . hurt for years when we weren't friends. But I told myself . . . I told myself I was right—"

"What happened that day was inevitable," Severus said, still cold. "We were too young to deal with everything we had to."

That might really be true. She'd certainly proved unable to deal with it with five years superadded experience. All she'd gained was the understanding that she didn't know how to deal with it. "Well, so's Remus. But he's grown up more than me already. I had to _die_ before we talked again, Sev, but it shouldn't have been like that."

She summoned all her courage, all her Gryffindor boldness, and reached out to wrap her fingers around his hand. For a moment he gripped back, as if in reflex, but then he simply let his hand hang there, and a moment later, tried to pull away. She threaded her fingers through his, hanging on.

"I want us to be friends again," she said. "The way we were supposed to be, before being young and stupid and stuck in the middle of a war got in the way."

"And Gryffindors always get what they want, do you think?" he asked.

She looked into his face. "I hope so."


	23. Chapter 23

_January 11, 1977_

The moon was setting and dawn was approaching, and the alteration of light seemed to change the whole world.

Or perhaps, Severus thought, it was just the effect of his mind-state.

It wasn't often that he was lost in uncertainty. That, like passivity, was not a luxury known to spies. Soldiers had their orders, and they followed them with grateful zeal, appreciating that a higher rank had simplified their world; passivity was the province of those who did not fight: the conscientious objector, the pacifist. A spy lived between worlds. They had their orders—from both sides, a factor which made their loyalty mutable, in any case—but they worked alone. Their cover was sometimes maintained at the expense of their morality. At times, sinking into your cover was the only way to maintain sanity, even though the danger of not returning to your true allegiance was always present, always lurking. Before, when Severus had felt uncertain, he had sunk into his Death Eater persona, or followed Dumbledore's orders; become a solider in thought and a bystander in action, pretending at the bliss of allowing someone else to think for him. But he'd always re-emerged under his own power: he had discovered the value of thinking for himself, and that wisdom could not be unlearned.

But he knew why so many people wanted to process only the thoughts of others: life was easier that way. You had less trouble getting through the day, less guilt when it was over, because the decisions were never fully _yours_.

It had been that way when he was a double-agent. There had even be the comfort of having no choice; following orders had been the moral thing to do: his repentance, his atonement, his straightest road to absolution. But now that was all gone, and he would not enter into it again. As little as he understood it, he seemed to have been forgiven by every power who'd had a stake in his guilt, even a few that didn't.

Which left him making all his own decisions. Alone, this had been a simple enough thing. But now here was Lily, rushing in like a fool and a Gryffindor (but of course, they were interchangeable), demanding to be included. And he didn't know whether he _should_.

Oh, he knew what he _wanted_. A few weeks of interaction had not altered what had endured for sixteen-and-a-half years of loneliness, except insofar as it had made it stronger. If she had returned to this whenever-or-wherever-they-really-were with no memories of loving Potter—even if she woke up tomorrow morning with amnesia— _Severus's_ situation would have been as perfect as could be. It would have been more ideal had she never loved Potter at all, but wishes didn't change reality into something more palatable. She had loved Potter; up until a couple of weeks ago, she had been his wife and the mother of his child, a child she had lost; how could she simply give that up? How could she talk herself through the logic of giving it up?

Self answered that it couldn't believe she would. People didn't work that way, especially not ones so guided by their feelings as Gryffindors and Lilys. He couldn't allow himself to sink into the dangerous, intoxicating fantasy of hoping that she would. Even entertaining the hope that she meant what she said, that she wanted to go with him above staying behind, was foolish. Too foolish. He despised the hope in himself. It was idiotic, contrary to everything that should be.

He wondered what it would take to get her to go back. He needed to get rid of her before he left England—the further she went with him, the more information she would have on his whereabouts, and that would endanger the both of them—but he was disgusted and infuriated to feel himself holding back in spite of acknowledging all of this. He had decades of experience at driving people away from him; he knew how it would end, with her; and yet that hope lurked, following him like a shadow trailing the body at midday.

She probably _believed_ what she said. But it was a fiction. At least one of them needed to remain aware of that.

Her exhaustion, as she trudged next to him, was as palpable as any emotion. He was headed toward a hotel—in Edinburgh, they would be easy enough to find, even in these thin, indefinable hours that crossed the border between latest night and earliest morning—but he chose not to share destinations with her, or even to talk to her much at all. He figured he shouldn't be kind. Kindness would blind her, obscure her real feelings, softening her doubts. If he wanted to trick her into coming with him, he might make a bid at kindness; but he wanted her to admit what she wouldn't, which was that, in the end, despite the new understanding she professed, she would chose _them._ Just as she'd done before.

He could feel his cool distance working on her already. Gryffindors were sinfully easy to manipulate emotionally. The simple act of repressing your own emotions affected theirs, filed them on edge, and Lily was even more susceptible than most. Her uncertainty wasn't as strong as her exhaustion, but it was detectable. Emotionally, she kept doing the equivalent of sneaking doubtful looks and biting her lip. She might even have been doing this physically; but he chose not to look directly at her. Instead, he concentrated on finding a hotel that would be open at this ungodly hour between night and morning.

It wasn't difficult; a backlit yellow sign within a few blocks of the train station demarcated a Best Western. Light also glowed out its front door. The street was empty, glistening with leftover moisture, mostly dark, so he crossed it without bothering to find a crosswalk.

A bored woman at the front desk checked them in. Because they had stopped at a Marks & Spencer in Glasgow some hours earlier, they weren't dressed like a pair of freaks, a boy in a dress and a girl in slashed trousers. The front desk woman probably found teenagers as boring as he did and preferred not to think about them.

Their room was up one flight of stairs, close to a fire escape and the ice machine room, and stocked with two horrible beds. Shades of déjà vu.

He went over the room, checking the curtains and the in-suite bathroom, which smelled of damp laundry—better, at least, than the mixed old-carpet-and-cigarette smell outside—while Lily collapsed onto the nearest bed and groaned.

"More sleeping on boards," she mumbled. Then she lifted her head and peered blearily at him in the yellow light. "Don't run off while I'm sleeping."

He didn't reply. At first he thought she'd fallen asleep, but a few minutes later she said, in a very small voice, "Sev?"

So he was forced to say: "I won't."

"Thank you," she said after a few moments. Within a minute, her breathing had evened out, and in the cast-off rectangle of light that fell onto the floor from the open bathroom door, he saw her body relax entirely, the stiffness of consciousness bleeding away.

He was tired, too, weary to his soul; he felt as if he hadn't had any opportunity to rest since Narcissa had shown up on his doorstep in the rain, begging for him to save her silly son. He could even go further back, to the night Potter had appeared with Diggory's corpse, white-faced and sweaty and covered in his own blood, clutching the Triwizard Cup; or to the year before, when he thought he'd finally got his hands on the worthless shit who had sold Lily to the Dark Lord. But it wasn't the time for sleeping, not yet. Now was the time for thinking without having to control his reactions, to worry what she was seeing and how much she was understanding. Some people felt they were most vulnerable when they slept, but he felt far more exposed when failing to obscure his thoughts and feelings.

In the relative darkness of the borrowed room, he let his Occlumency shred itself. He was too exhausted to maintain it, and alone, like this—more or less alone—he didn't have to.

Lily couldn't see him.

He'd pulled the bathroom door shut so the light only limned the door-jamb; he could just barely make out her form. In the dimness, her hair looked black; in the moments before he'd shut the door, her sleeping face had struck him as disturbingly young, with faint, underlying impressions of a much older weariness—older, even, than twenty-one.

She _needed_ someone to be kind to her. He wasn't the last person on Earth who could accomplish that, but only so long as the Dark Lord, Bellatrix, and Lucius were alive, probably.

 _Poor girl,_ he thought, mocking himself.

What had possessed her to go running after him like that? She had suggested the Shrieking Shack played into it, that unbelievably stupid incident over twenty years past in his own life. Somehow, in the time he'd escaped McGonagall and the morons, _that_ had come to light and apparently been enough to drive Lily to flee Hogwarts, to abandon, for the moment, all her ties there and render her incoherent and reckless with guilt. He wondered briefly how she'd learned about it, but dismissed it as unimportant. The more interesting truth was that she hadn't known; that Potter and the others had never brought it up. He had never quite dared to hope that openly.

She'd fallen fully clothed across the bed, shoes and all. You couldn't sleep comfortably like that. With a sigh deep inside, he got up and quietly removed her shoes, then maneuvered the blankets down and rolled her into them. He'd only done this once, put someone to bed, years ago, when Draco was very young. He couldn't have been more than three. Narcissa's drunken nanny had broken her hip on a night when Narcissa had been nursing food poisoning from a bad shrimp cocktail, and Lucius (always useless in a crisis) had been venting his stress by abusing the house-elf. Severus experienced a brief pang of revulsion at comparing Lily, in this moment, to a tiny child—but then the distaste was subsumed by something greater. He paused, standing over Lily's bed, and the thought surfaced: _I'll never go back to that._

The Malfoys had been his friends. There had been many times when he'd wanted to wring their necks, but that was normal for him; the desire to wring necks surfaced about twenty-five times a minute, on average. Now Lucius was going to have to deal with scheming opera dancers on his own, Narcissa would have to find a comrade among her acquaintance of sadistic society wives, and Draco would need a different Potions master to ensure he even existed. Narcissa wouldn't trust an anonymous correspondent.

Severus sat down on the other bed, rubbing at his face. This was why he couldn't believe Lily could possibly give up Potter and the rest: for anything, let alone himself. They'd had a friendship, the two of them—and it had been as dead as a load of cold ashes for years, only reviving itself here, in death. She'd had a _life_ with Potter, just as Severus had had a life at Hogwarts with Dumbledore and Minerva and the rest and with the Malfoys outside of it. The difference was that his life had formed out of choices he could not make again. Had he been able to give up the choices without giving up the result, he would have. But Lily didn't have that dichotomy holding her back, that all-or-nothing. She could sink into that life again with ease.

. . . couldn't she?

He lowered his hands enough to peer through the bars his fingers made over his eyes. In a very material way, the Lily who he'd just tucked up into the scratchy blankets was a different person than the sixteen-year-old girl who'd ended the rocky course of their friendship. Of course she was. She was different not only because experiences had changed her, as they did everyone; she was simply _older_. . . Although she scarcely acted like it. The difference between _this_ Lily and the girl he'd last spoken to was undeniable, but _this_ Lily had exhibited very little of the maturity and self-assurance he would have expected of a young woman who had lost both of her parents within two, three years of each other; who had fought in a war; who had been married and had a child. The strongest emotion he felt from Lily was . . . confusion and loss, bordering on helplessness.

Perhaps that was inevitable, when you had to endure so much in such a short time. Surviving others, especially loved ones, changed you; but dying your own death? He wasn't someone who felt lost and confused, but he wasn't a young woman; he'd had no wife or child to be torn from. It was probably just enough to make her helpless, but too much to comprehend. He had less to deal with, and he dealt with it by shutting off his emotions. Lily didn't have that recourse. It was really surprising, perhaps even telling, that she remained tender-hearted. Loss had not turned into cynicism, bitterness, or cruelty, as it had with him, seventeen years ago; that was a blessing, and it said a lot about her. It fit the image of the girl he'd known, even shorn of the certainty she had once possessed, the kind that had made her cut him off with a single, contemptuous look.

Lily had always been ruled by her heart, but she'd never exactly understood that about herself. She read instinct as proof and emotions as logic. The biased arguments of people around her were evaluated from a perspective of _feeling_. She had never been a thinker. She had always done her schoolwork attentively, with eagerness and a desire to please, but confronted with her again, like this, he had decided that her life's convictions had stemmed less from strength of character than from blind certainty, which had arisen from a slew of factors she neither identified nor recognized.

At this time of life, he knew how Gryffindor worked: its prejudices were strong, even staunch, and invariably formed by fallacies. Gryffindors loved to decide things absolutely without muddling through the difficult process of thought. Many Slytherins had become Death Eaters; therefore, Death Eaters were a result of being Slytherin, and Slytherins would invariably become Death Eaters. Many Death Eaters practiced Dark magic; therefore, Dark magic was the magic practiced by Death Eaters, and people who were not Death Eaters did not do Dark magic. And like any Gryffindor, Lily had been surrounded by this incomplete picture of the facts for seven years—more, really, when he counted her entrée into the Order and her marriage to the Marauders. Fed on a diet of incompetent logic, she had blundered through social complexities too massive and intricate to comprehend at her age, stocked with prejudice that never found its way to the source but misdirected itself onto Slytherin school ties. Because she was, at heart, gentle, that House hatred had taken the form of self-righteousness and judgment rather than brutality and bullying. She hadn't been raised to the latter, as Potter and Black, even himself, had, although she had certainly, to some measure, been desensitized over the years. Violence bloomed throughout Hogwarts' corridors as naturally as flowers in the spring. After a time, even the gentlest heart built up some immunity.

But in the past couple of weeks (and God, was that _all_?) he'd seen plenty of evidence that she wasn't as strong-minded as he'd thought, certainly not on her own. From a stance of firm hatred of Death Eaters and Dark magic, a distrust of Slytherins and all the associated ideals, she had suddenly shifted to passing over his own continuous practice of advanced Dark spells, to saying she'd been _wrong_ , to leaving James Potter lying unconscious on the floor and entreating his own forgiveness. It was such a bizarre about-face; and although he didn't deny she was now in a position and frame of mind to learn more, to consider factors beyond their face value, Severus couldn't help suspecting that this time, she was letting herself be as strongly guided by what _he_ said as she had let her Gryffindor surroundings influence her before. He had once again moved into a position of prominence, just as he had when they were nine and she wanted to know about Hogwarts and dementors and wands and whether fairies and unicorns were real.

Naturally, this was better for him; he was even tempted to work this advantage to its fullest extent. But he wasn't a young man; he wasn't foolish in that way anymore. However advantageous Lily's susceptibility seemed in the moment, he knew it still left him with a Lily whose understanding was incomplete, whose heart was changeable. Just as she had changed from that to this, so she would certainly change from this to something else. Which placed him doubly in danger of losing her. She had a more complete picture of what had happened; but how much did she understand who he _was_?

And if she didn't understand that, he couldn't predict how she would react once she did.

He smoothed his thumb over her forehead, pushing strands of her hair off her face. Her hair was soft, slightly oily, and her skin was warm. He had lost her, seventeen years ago, for good; lost even the hope that she would be all right. How he might have gone on had she lived and the war ended—if it could have, without her death—he would never be able to say. Life had been a bleak series of nothings after her, shallow friendships that never pierced to the core of wariness, where emotion, _real_ emotion, the kind Occlumency couldn't dilute, was locked away, protected by bitterness and fear. He had not been entirely alone—he'd had Albus, Minerva, Narcissa, Lucius, even Draco before he turned into another bratty adolescent—but he'd been cut off from all of them by his own choice. He had never believed that anyone could appreciate his hopes as much as Lily had when they were children; and at the same time, there had always been the fear that someone else would hurt him as much as she had. There had been too much to lose and only the uncertain possibility of gain.

And now, there was always the possibility that he and Lily could wind up back at that place, where the sky of the future was rent with cracks, despair and emptiness. For all her confusion in the moment, she was more fearless than himself. She more fearless than most, even: she could love without reserve and take its risks head-on. That was hard for anyone to do. He had only been able to bring himself to do it once, and it had ended in decades of misery. He had been just strong enough to keep hold of it, but not strong enough to move on.

He wasn't sure he would be able to endure it a second time.

* * *

 

Lily was running, bent double, down the tunnel to the Shrieking Shack—she had to get to the end, because Severus had gone, had left Hogwarts, left her, and she had to find him, before he left forever—

Then she heard the snarling, the screaming, and she realized she was too late, but it wasn't to catch Severus before he left; she was too late to save him from the werewolf—

She wrenched herself out of the nightmare in a panic. "Sev!" she cried, trying to scramble upright, got tangled in the covers and fell headfirst out of bed.

The sound of his voice somewhere above her shot through her heart like an arrow: "What are you doing to yourself?"

He pulled the duvet off her head, his expression faintly sardonic, giving nothing else away. She kicked her legs free of the tangle of fleecy blankets and scratchy sheets and used the horrible mattress to haul herself upright, but the impulse to fling her arms around him fluctuated into uncertainty now that she was looking at him: the real Severus, in the mixture of yellowish lamplight and hard gray sky glinting dully past the chink in the curtains.

"I . . . had a nightmare," she said weakly.

"I should hope so," he said. "If that was your typical way of waking up, I'd be concerned."

 _Would you?_ she wondered, but she didn't say it. Somehow it seemed too . . . needy and childish, even petulant.

"Continental breakfast," he said, pointing one long, thin finger at the table beside the window, where a box of cereal, a child's carton of milk, and a spotty banana sat. "Whatever the hell that means. That was the least wretched bit of fruit on offer this morning."

"Thanks." He'd also got her coffee, but she couldn't drink it; whoever had brewed it had done so as if the coffee had personally insulted them.

"Where's yours?" she asked, and then wondered if she shouldn't; if he'd take the question not as curiosity or worry but nagging. She reminded herself that if she second-guessed everything to do with him, she'd drive herself barmy. Severus didn't need _her_ help driving her mad.

"I ate earlier. It's dusk again."

She dropped the banana. "I've been asleep _all day_?"

"All the better for creeping about," Severus said dismissively.

He'd brought a knife and spoon with the food. Had he remembered that she liked cut-up bananas in her cereal? He must have, if he'd added the knife. The thought made her feel a strange mixture of aggrieved and self-conscious, warm with pleasure and guilt.

She ate her soggy cereal, concentrating on the way the milk cooled the banana slices, making them even more slimy.

Severus was fiddling with the phone book, for some reason. She wondered if it was so he wouldn't have to sit at the table with her.

Timidly, she said, "Did you really file a report with the Ministry about . . . them being Animagi?"

"Your husband and two of his pack members?" Severus said, writing (she presumed) a number down on the room's provided note-pad. "Yes, I did." He looked up and met her eyes dead on, almost challenging, in a subtle way, as if to say, _What of it?_

"Why?" she asked neutrally.

"They were endangering everyone." Severus closed the phone book and stuffed it back into its drawer. "The students, themselves, endangering Lupin most of all. Would you wish for him to be brought up on charges of infecting a witch or wizard? Under the circumstances—especially including Black's charming history—the authorities would have interpreted Lupin's actions as premeditated. In case the past few years spent mothering four grown men and an infant have left you with too little time to study the broader points of law, premeditated crime is more harshly dealt with than crimes proven to have been committed in passion."

"Why are you being horrible?" she asked without meaning to.

A glint of emotion surfaced in his eyes, but though it stayed in sight, she couldn't interpret it. "I am being myself. If it discomfits you, I suggest you seek solace at Hogwarts."

"I don't want to seek bloody solace at bloody Hogwarts," she said, wondering if she sounded and looked as troubled as she felt.

"Perhaps if you are exposed to me long enough, you will," he said. Then he stood. He'd been wearing his coat all the time he'd been in the room—or all the time she'd been awake to notice, at least. Wasn't the same thing. "I am going downstairs to mail a letter. You may wait here."

"All right," she said quietly, and watched him slip out the door, feeling helpless. What was she supposed to do? She'd said she was sorry, and she _was_ —so very sorry—but it was as if Severus was waiting for her to apologize for something else.

She ground the soggy remains of her cereal into the bottom of her milky bowl, thinking as hard as she could. Severus was acting the exact way he'd done for the past couple of days, since he'd removed her curse, when she'd found him in the tower and his anger had been palpable; only he was more in control, now. Too much in control for her comfort. He'd told her he was always angry, that Dark backlash made it more difficult for him to sublimate his anger . . . but he'd been a lot nicer to her before getting back to Hogwarts. Even the effects of Contrapasso hadn't made him act as cold and unfeeling as he'd been doing at Hogwarts . . . From what she could remember during the time she'd been cursed, he had even been sort of—tender. He'd taken care of her. So this _could_ just be backlash, because last night he'd outright _told_ her that he'd been doing extra Dark magic on top of the healing spell.

But some instinct told her that this was more than Dark magic run-off. It had some other source. It was too controlled and consistent. She'd apologized for running off after the spell and not knowing about the Shack, and both times he had seemed amazed that she'd brought up either of those things; he'd even been dismissive of her apologies, as if they hadn't been necessary. But the apology that did seem crucial—and one had to be, after everything—she didn't know how to give, or what for.

She dropped her head into her hands and rubbed the heels of her palms against her closed eyes and eyebrows. Had Severus always been this difficult? Probably . . . she just noticed more, now. Of everything.

 _Maybe,_ said her Inner Dementor, _you care more now. Hard to care about someone when you're fed up with them._

She thumped her forehead against the table. You couldn't get absolution if the priest said, "What are you confessing to me about _that_ for? Why don't you tell me about some _real_ sins?"

The doorknob rattled. She sat up, pushing her hair out of her eyes, and looked toward the it. Even though she knew Severus would have arranged his expression into that chilly distance, she couldn't stop the human impulse to look into his face and hope it would tell her something.

_And because you like looking at his face. . ._

She stared. The Severus who walked into the room looked exactly like Lucius Malfoy.

She jumped to her feet.

"Expelliarmus," Malfoy said.

Nothing happened.

He and Lily stared at each other.

Then he said, " _Accio_ wand," and her wand flitted from the bedside table to his hand. He sighed.

"Pathetic," he said, as though disappointed in her poor performance, and dropped the wand at his feet. "I would have thought Severus would be teaching you better, but then, he's left you all alone, so perhaps he doesn't care—" He turned as the door swung open again and Severus practically billowed into the doorway, dark and menacing. "Or is it a salutary lesson on the importance of possessing a modicum of intelligence?"

"Funny you should mention intelligence. I'm surprised you made it this far into Muggle space without shriveling up," Severus said, and somehow managed to shut the door firmly without touching it or withdrawing his wand. Lily was impressed.

"It's been rather like visiting the circus," said Malfoy with refined disdain. "Duller, even, than I'd thought. I didn't even have to kill anyone to get inside."

"Is that supposed to be funny?" Lily asked, incredulous.

"Yes," Severus said without looking at her, his gaze trained on Malfoy.

"I'm totally amazed," she said.

"We've all been experiencing our fair share of surprises, it would seem," Malfoy said, with a subtle sneer that looked very familiar. Was he the one who'd taught Severus to curl his lip like that? Eurgh. "My own, for instance, have been considerable. With everything I've been hearing about you, Severus—the Tri-Fold Return, for example—I would have thought you'd have made yourself harder to scare up."

 _Tri-Fold Return?_ Lily thought. _Is that the spell Sev cast on me to hurt people who try to hurt me?_

"I took precautions," Severus said, with a brazen, contemptuous look. "Ones you oughtn't have been able to circumvent. I overlooked something, apparently."

"Ah," Malfoy said, slightly smiling—but not in any nice way—"you see, you accounted for _specifics_. I couldn't find _you_ or the Mudblood—but Dark magic leaves traces, Severus, surely you remembered. All I needed to do was locate anyone who had channeled significant amounts of Dark magic recently—it was really laughably easy, I must say."

"I didn't realize you had a Focalizer," Severus said coldly. "How unfortunate that the oversight has led to my having to talk to you ever again."

"There are quite a few things I don't understand," said Malfoy, almost managing to ignore this with aplomb. "A little bird at St. Mungo's reported that the curse this . . . " His cold, shallow gray eyes flicked across Lily. " . . . _creature_ used on you looked like the work of Dark magic. Lowest-level, but Dark nonetheless. My source tended the both of you—you under its influence, her during its backlash . . . but I wondered, why on Earth would you let a silly little Mudblood curse you with Dark magic? When I first knew you, as a foul-mouthed, filthy eleven-year-old, you already possessed a decent arsenal of low-level spells."

Lily blinked. At _eleven?_ That was horrifying and a bit . . . impressive.

"Yes, well, we know how allergic you are to books," said Severus. "Even touching a page can bring out hives in you."

"It seemed to me," said Malfoy, speaking as though Severus hadn't spoken, but narrowing his pale, almost colorless eyes, "rather odd that a Mudblood would be working Dark magic in any case. Unless, of course, you were teaching her, and a lesson went rather wrong."

Lily blinked twice.

"But of course, you'd be too proud to admit it," Malfoy said. "You were always so very proud, Severus. It's one of the things I've almost admired about you, at times, as much as a man of my stature can admire a creature of yours. You're bloody-minded in your pride. No matter how easily someone may look down on you, you never admit they have cause. But you can pretend to their face that you wouldn't spit in it if it were expedient. You're a Slytherin at heart, Severus."

"Am I successfully hiding how much you're boring me?" Severus asked.

Malfoy's smile was tight, like leather gloves. "Proving my point," he drawled; but Lily was watching his hands, and she saw how his right tightened on the head of his cane.

What Malfoy said next made the room reel about Lily like a boat on a stormy sea.

"I presented my theory to the Dark Lord," Malfoy said. "He thought it had merit."

That time, Severus actually blinked.

"He is prepared to allow that you might deserve . . . another look. Anyone who practices Dark magic at your level, who is already preparing a student, and who would swell his ranks of followers by two, he is prepared to be . . . somewhat more lenient toward than he would otherwise."

Swell his ranks by followers of . . . Lily stared from Malfoy to Severus to Malfoy again.

"Are you saying Voldemort wants Sev to bring me along?" Lily asked, incredulous again.

Malfoy regarded her with something like horror mixed with revulsion. At the sound of Voldemort's name, probably—her only being a Mudblood and all. She rolled her eyes, but Malfoy, as if putting the impudence of her existence out of his mind with heroic effort, turned back to Severus.

"That old fool Dumbledore and the Ministry will hardly allow you to openly teach her all that you know of Dark magic. You must know that your talents would not only be supported but welcomed among my associates. The Dark Lord is offering you certain protection from the caprice of unjust laws and the judgments of the self-righteous. He is showing you tremendous favor in this, Severus. He does not often listen to excuses. I have never known him to do so before."

"Aren't I lucky," Severus said, with something that looked like a very faint, very subtle, sardonic smile. "But then, he did always profess to like me."

The confusion on Malfoy's face was quickly smothered, but Lily had seen it. She was sure Severus was giving her some kind of a signal, but her wand was a Malfoy's feet.

"It's only too bad he's something of a maniac," Severus said. "If I were you, Lucius, I would find a way to relocate. Fake your death and move to Argentina."

"I am no coward who refuses to face his own glory," Malfoy said, cold and sneering. "I am—"

What he was, Lily never found out, because before he could enlighten them, she tackled him round the knees. He yelped as he fell, grappling with his cane. There was a flash of red light, and then he thudded to the carpet, limp and heavy, squashing Lily's arm that had got trapped underneath him.

"Ow," she said. "Well, that kind of worked."

"Gryffindor tactics," said Severus in an unsteady voice, "rather need some adjusting to."

She looked up at his face. "Are you _laughing_?"

"N-no." He turned away and put a hand over his face.

"Well, I'm proud," Lily said, tugging her arm to try and free it. "Not only do I have the distinction of being perhaps the first ever person to rugby tackle Lucius Malfoy, but I made you _laugh_. Can I keep his cane as a souvenir?"

"No, you—"

Severus froze in the midst of turning back toward her: not just his body, but his expression.

Lily didn't even have time to wonder why before the window exploded.

She ducked, but couldn't fully cover her head because of her trapped arm. But instead of glass digging into her face and ears and upraised hand, she felt nothing but a ripple of wind, and heard pinging sounds—

Squeezing one eye open, she saw shards of glass ricocheting off a dome-shaped shield Severus had thrown over the three of them: herself, himself, and Malfoy. But shields only lasted a few seconds, and with a shudder and a loud, rumbling bang, the room's door crashed off its hinges, ripping splinters out of the wall as it fell.

Lily flung her free arm toward her wand and snatched it up, hitting the man who was rocketing over the threshold square in the chest with a Stupefy; he crashed back into the hall, but she saw another elbow protruding around the door-jamb: he wasn't alone out there.

The window was now lying in thousands of shards across the table, the floor, the beds; at least one wizard on a broom hovered out there, firing spells inside; she could see spell-light glinting off his skin as he cast, but it was too dark to make out more than that; they must have switched off or broken the street-lamps nearby. She and Severus were in a bad spot for defending: the room's layout protected them from the men attacking from the door, but exposed them completely to the ones outside the window; and the wizards outside the window had a greater distance to avoid their counter-attack.

"Can we Apparate?" she hissed.

"No," Severus said curtly, forcing the wizard outside the window to veer out of sight with a quick volley of Stupefies: five in a row. When a flash of yellow light tried to take advantage of Severus's offensive, Lily slammed up a Protego; the room flickered like a lightning storm.

"Lucius," Severus said, as though they were sitting in a café, not defending their liberty in a wrecked hotel room, "put up a barrier when he entered the building. That's how I knew something was wrong."

Lily was impressed again. She knew you could train yourself to be sensitive to spells cast, but she'd never been able to do it. Even when she was concentrating and knew they were coming—

"What should we do?" she whispered quickly, and cast Homnum Revelo. "There are four more out in the hallway—"

"I'd forgotten that Lucius isn't stupid," Severus said in a low tone somewhere between a hiss and a snarl, his expression both grim and fierce. "He'll have warned them about the Tri-Fold Return, as well— Leave off the door for a moment; help me get rid of this fool outside the window."

He fired another quick volley of Stupefies; when the man veered to the left to avoid them, Lily hit him with her own Stunner, and he toppled out of sight. She winced; they were only one floor up, but if he fell wrong, he could break something vital, and you couldn't count on Death Eaters, or whatever these were, to catch each other; they didn't seem at all concerned about Malfoy—

As his comrade left the ranks, another of the broom-borne wizards dived in through the open window. Severus Stunned him much more easily than the other; they had far less room to maneuver inside. The—Death Eater?—crashed onto one of the beds, but a new stream of spells rocketed through the window from the wand of a third wizard, crashing into the wall behind them, raining plaster; Lily ducked—and then felt someone lifting her off the floor by the scruff of her shirt, hand half tangled in her hair. In a split second she was airborne, and a Death Eater was trying to grapple her onto his broom—she twisted, but the hand in her hair made her eyes water; if only she could see to grab something to hit him with—

Something slammed into them and the world went tumbling over itself, filled with red and yellow and purple and white light. She heard a tinkling crash, a muffled exclamation; spell-fire lifted the hair on her scalp, rushed prickling across her skin; she had fallen onto the unconscious Stunned wizard, between the beds, and spells were sizzling through the air over her head.

She groped across his slack hands until she found his wand; then she crawled to the edge of the beds and peered beneath the frame: two sets of feet were advancing into the room. Stretching her arm beneath the bed, she hit the one on the right with a Petrificus and the wizard keeled over; the other set of feet turned to duck back into the hall, but she got him, too.

The room went quiet.

"Severus?" she called, sitting up.

The unconscious flying wizard jumbled at her feet between the beds—Lucius Malfoy tangled in an unconscious heap—three wizards piled higgledy-piggledy in the doorway, scattered into the hall—

No Severus.

Her heart shot into her throat. Frantically, she cast Homnum Revelo, but the hallway was empty, except of a faint trace of someone unconscious, a few meters away: a woman, probably a Muggle; no Severus. She ran over to the window and cast the spell below, onto the wet grass, and found four people, one of them male and fully conscious.

"Severus!" she cried.

A Lumos winked on in the darkness below, and his up-lit features appeared craggily in its cast-off glow, his face turned up toward her. "Are you injured?"

"No, no." She leaned out the window to scan the wall for a way down. A drainpipe!

"What are you doing?" Severus called up as she climbed onto the window-sill, reaching out for the drainpipe. "Use the bloody broom that's in the bloody room if you're coming down!"

"Sod that!" she retorted, and swung out onto the pipe. Bracing her feet against the metal straps where it screwed into the wall, she shimmied down, heedless of her scraping palms, misjudged the distance a bit, and thudded the last few feet to the grass, landing on her bum. It was raining, had been raining, and the grass was sodden; water speckling down from the dark clouds pattered onto her face, her bare arms, and she could feel mud sticking to the seat of her trousers, her knees as she scrambled up. Severus was standing over her, his Lumos-lit wand still gripped in his right hand, his face pale and his lip split, bruises probably forming in the spotty darkness.

"Gryffindors—" he started.

She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

For an infinitesimal yet indefinite moment, there was only the sensation of being pressed against him—hot and cold, momentum and stillness, panic and relief. It was as if someone had just taken a snapshot of her life, and she was frozen in that single moment.

And then other sensations began to line up for review in her mind: Severus was rigid, like iron and stone and ice. Her lips hadn't made it all the way onto his; they were pressed to the corner of his mouth. She pushed her eyes open, and stared straight into his—

She was falling down into a stream of memories, so fast-moving and numerous that she couldn't make them out; just snatches, of people and places and sounds, emotions shifting through her, _into_ her like a tide, so powerful that she was lost in them, completely subsumed, no longer Lily but a small, light thing rushing across the crests of the ocean—

And then Severus's hands clamped down on her shoulders and he wrenched her away. The connection tore, like a wave breaking on the shore, and she staggered, gasping, everything inside her spinning wildly without an axis.

"Shit," she said weakly, and her legs gave out. Severus's hands slipped down her shoulders to her elbows; he tried to keep her upright, but she slumped onto the wet grass at his feet and he almost fell over her.

"What," he said, his voice ragged and harsh, as if he'd just taken half a kilometer at a sprint, "did you do that for?"

"I thought maybe they'd killed you or something." She also felt like she'd been working herself far too hard. She pressed her hand against her chest, as if trying to soothe her heart, to calm it. Severus had said, _I'm always angry_ ; _I'm simply not showing how angry I am._ Was that rush of emotion—had that been how Severus felt _all the time_? How did he not go mad? She'd never felt so _much_.

Severus just panted, like he was trying to get his breath back. After several uneven breaths, he straightened from where he'd been half bent over her. "We need to get out of here." He ground out the words. "The MLE will be all over this place in just a few minutes; that amount of magic in a Muggle-designated area won't go unnoticed, even by those fatwits. Can you walk?"

"Yeah. I think so." She pushed herself onto her knees and then climbed to her feet. Severus kept his hand turned out toward her, almost as if he didn't want her to fall but was trying to ward her off from touching him.

"Come on, then," he said roughly, turning away.

She followed him through the damp garden, to a gate set into an iron fence that opened onto an alley. He hoisted himself over it and she followed; they ducked behind a closed-up dumpster just in time to hear a series of Apparition pops behind them, back the way they'd come. Spell-light flickered high on the wet bricks of the buildings around them, on the other side of their dumpster.

"Just in time," Lily observed, and then shivered, because she didn't have her coat. Adrenaline wearing off, she realized she was cold.

Damp wool descended on her; Severus had taken off his coat and tossed it at her.

"But—" she started.

"Don't be an idiot," he said. "I, at least, am wearing long sleeves."

She pulled the coat on without protest or comment, noting how unmodulated his voice was. The cool restraint from before was gone; even his accent had unraveled, more of the Northern showing through.

"Sev," she started, in a half-whisper.

"Not until we're further away from them," he said curtly. "Follow me and keep quiet."

 _And I bet it'll just so happen you're back in control of yourself by the time it's safe to talk,_ she thought darkly; but even so, she knew he was right. She tucked his coat around herself and followed, offering a silent apology for getting mud all over his things.

There was something heavy in one of the pockets, knocking against her thigh. She groped inside and pulled it out—some funny kind of telescope, black with gold accents, carved from wood as smooth as marble. Was this the Focal-thingy Lucius Malfoy had used to find them?

"Put that away," Sev said, making her jump. "We want to preserve that."

"This is the Focal-thingy?"

"Yes. Don't stall. We don't want to answer questions from the MLE, especially if they're already looking for us."

She tucked the Focalizer back into her pocket and followed him, her heart beating hard.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue in this chapter is adapted from pg. 699 - 701 of _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ , Scholastic edition, 2007.

Severus's mind had shattered into pieces of light—shards of glass, reflecting light, too bright, garish.

The rush of emotion that had surged like a tidal wave when she _kissed him_ , stirred by pressure of her so close—the warmth of her breath and the swell of the _longing_ and relief—their thoughts had flowed together—the memory pushed against the inside of his skin. Too deep and too massive to stay in his mind—bleeding through each of his veins, along every nerve ending.

_It's not real it's not_

He tried to recapture his Occlumency, his shields, to reassemble himself. His mother was wrong; Occlumency didn't dilute your ability to experience emotion as you would have otherwise; it made you _unable_ to. Emotions became all or nothing. When Occlumency enshrouded you, you were nothing; you were free from your anger, your helplessness, your despair, your worthlessness. When it fell away, all of that which you had locked away, not wanting as any part of you, reminded you that it was there, as forceful in its renewed presence as you had been in ignoring it before.

He had to put all of this away. He couldn't think with it there, pushing against his skin, breaking his reasoning into pieces. He couldn't be foolish—he couldn't be weak—he couldn't allow—

_What? Hope?_

No. Hope was too fragile. It burnt to ash in a dry wind. It had never been able to withstand the force of his despair.

* * *

 

Around corners, down narrow alleys, across icy puddles, she followed his lead, attuned to every shift, every tension that she could see, every pause. When he turned enough for her to see his face, although he never looked back at her, although he was completely focused on his navigation, she felt her pulse quicken. She'd _kissed_ him. She'd thrown herself on him and kissed him.

She wanted to do it again.

Realizing that made her feel excited and unnerved and anxious and a bit desperate, not to mention confused. His response hadn't been exactly . . . encouraging. When you kissed someone, you generally didn't want them to shove you off and then act like you'd fired a gun right over their head. But . . . she thought back to that rush of emotion as his Occlumency had crashed . . . she wasn't sure what all of that had been, or why she'd suddenly been in the midst of it, but she hadn't felt any . . . revulsion.

She wished she knew what she _had_ felt from him.

And then there was—well, there was James. The past. The _before_. She grimaced as a stew of thoughts bubbled up, each wanting to be considered, but she couldn't sort through what she felt. All she knew was that if Severus was here, she would be going with him. In the darkness outside the Headmaster's study, in the midst of all her doubt and pain, she had managed to calm herself, and that thought had shone clear and pure in her mind: _Find Severus_.

She should do that now, that same exercise. Breathe, and let her focus drift. Forget, for a moment, everything about the past, everything to do with everyone—with James, Severus, Dumbledore, all her friends, even herself and Severus. Forget what was muddled . . . _different_. Forget that knowledge had made everything change, even though she didn't know to _what_.

Breathe . . .

Sev's fingers clamped down on her wrist, making her start. Her nascent tranquility snapped. Sensation rocketed out from that point of her skin, traveling to her extremities—

"Pay attention, if you bloody please," he said, his voice making her fingertips tingle and her stomach crowd with confusion and doubt and just _too much_. "This way."

And he dragged her onto a side street lined with parked cars. A block or so in the distance, a broad avenue gleamed in the night.

He let go of her wrist. She tried to push the memory of his touch to the back of her mind, but it kept sticking.

She trailed Sev onto the main street. From there, Edinburgh's castle was visible on the rising hill, glowing against the back-drop of night. It was a weeknight, but dinner hour; the pubs and restaurants were all alight and busy. She and Severus faded easily into the stream of people. At least, she hoped they did. Who else might be looking for them? Were they safe if they had Malfoy's Focalizer?

Jesus, she was tired of running and hiding, of fighting and concealing and worrying. What she wouldn't give to just have a little house with a garden . . . to get nothing but dirt under her fingernails, to worry only about taxes and the laundry piling up in the hamper, and what she should feed Harry for lunch—

Tears stung her eyes, sudden and unexpected, and her heart wrenched.

"Sev?" From reflex, she found herself taking his hand; but he went as rigid as if her fingers were porcupine quills and she quickly let go, even though she didn't want to, her chilled cheeks feeling suddenly hot.

"What?" he asked tightly, not looking at her, but staring fixedly across the intersection at the crosswalk. On Lily's other side, a couple were leaning on each other, the woman laughing at something the man was telling her. Lily wished they would go away. She didn't need that contrast right now: the image of two happy people, careless with their affection, and her own reality, almost afraid to touch him now, afraid of what she might break.

"I—" She coughed, even though she didn't need to. _Talk about something simple._ "Are we—in a hurry?" Well, of course they were, they were running from the MLE and from Dumbledore and now _Voldemort_ too—

"It would be advisable to get out of town, yes." His voice was still not nearly as modulated as she was used to hearing it. Traces of his childhood accent shone through. She loved those traces.

"Then that's what we should do," she said.

Sev didn't look at her, only jerked his head in a parody of a nod. The walk-sign blinked across the street, and they flowed with the crowd onto the white stripes.

"Erm . . . I thought you did some kind of—you-know," she said, trying to pitch her voice as low as he'd done earlier, even though she doubted any of the people around them would care what two teenagers were talking about; or hear them, beneath all that cheerful, trivial noise. "So anyone got hurt who hurt me?"

"The spell recognizes intent," Severus said. With his shoulders slightly hunched so that his dirty hair fell around his face, he looked every inch the awkward, moody teenager. The sight of him like that tenderized her heart. "It's designed to protect you from potential killers above all else. Lucius knows how it works; he'd have warned them to concentrate on hurting only me. Here. This way."

She followed him beneath a covered bus stop. Would the spell have kept her safe from Voldemort, had Sev been able to cast it on her, or had it been beyond his abilities at twenty-one? Decisively, she knew she would never ask. "But that one bloke did try to carry me out the window, didn't he? On a broom—then you tackled him—"

"If he focused only on carrying you off, he wouldn't have been injured. That's the weakness of the Tri-Fold Return." Lights from the circle of flowing traffic tracked across him, blotting out all the shadows in his face, making his eyes, for a moment, lucid.

"But . . . why'd you cast it, then? I mean, if it's such a risk to you and it can be got around—"

"Because while it's cast on you, it safeguards you from serious harm. Their ability to cause you pain is hampered not only by the physical injuries that will result but by their constantly having to think outside their own reflexes, guard their thoughts. _You'd_ eventually win."

"But you jumped him when he was trying to carry me off, didn't you?"

"The Dark Lord could have broken it," he said flatly.

Voldemort was so— _inconvenient_ , she thought wildly. "Were those men Death Eaters?"

"They weren't anyone I recognized, but in a year or more, you might be able to call them that." In an uncharacteristic gesture, he pushed his hand backward through his hair, raking its lank strands out of his face. The tense lines in his face, pulling on his features . . . he was frustrated. She realized the difference in him was from his Occlumency not rising again. A lump rose into her throat.

"I didn't fucking expect this," he muttered.

"Oh, please," she said croakily. "I know you're abominably clever, but you're not _actually_ omniscient. And no one expects you to be," she added when he directed a dark, intense look at her, almost a glare. She felt heat prickling over the back of her neck at the force of it.

"In this case, prescience is literally life-preserving," he said. "Please attempt to confine your Gryffindor tactics to rugby tackles and shinnying down drainpipes and leave complacency where it belongs."

"You're one to talk scornfully about rugby tackles, after you tackled that bloke out the window—you did, didn't you? Something slammed into him and me; I felt it."

"I just said that rugby tactics _were_ useful." Then he dismissed the matter, hunching his shoulders down again. "Lucius has complicated matters by acting more intelligently than I'd have given him credit for at this age. The stupid bugger," he muttered.

". . . Were you honestly friends with him?" she asked, mostly just wondering. She'd been friends with Peter. Or she'd thought. And with Sirius, who'd tried to kill Severus. Her stomach squirmed with slimy tendrils of unpleasant emotion.

"Of a sort," Severus said, not looking at her.

It was funny how perspective worked: in light of what she'd learned about Sirius, she had no trouble letting Sev keep these memories of Lucius Malfoy.

"What's he done that's so complicated?"

"Had he been our only drop-in, I would have Obliviated him and altered his memories. But now it would be far too risky to get near him. It's not a chance I can take." He stared over the rush of traffic, into the distance of thought. "He also didn't take my defection the way I'd anticipated . . . if the Dark Lord sees me as a possible ally, and then learns of what can only be construed as my flat refusal to be any such thing, that makes me an enemy. Of his. " His expression darkened.

This pronouncement demanded she be quiet for a moment, as if she had crested a small hill and seen a glacial mountain rising into the heavens miles in the distance.

"They'll keep coming after us, won't they?"

"Yes," he said, still looking over the traffic.

"Because now he's going to think you're a powerful Dark wizard who doesn't want anything to do with him." Lily felt a coldness yawning inside her. "Like a . . . rival?"

"He'll want to get to me before Dumbledore does. Whether to recruit me or to kill me will depend on the timing." Severus's eyes cut toward her, although no other part of him moved. "The same now goes for you."

"Well," she said, willing herself not to look away, "I guess I'm lucky I've got you."

His gaze sharpened, becoming so intense she wasn't successful at staving off the blush. In fact, _he_ seemed to sharpen all over, to mute his surroundings and almost rise out of them. She lost the resolve to meet his eyes and stared instead at his hands. They were so tight on his arms, she believed they might be shaking.

She steeled her resolve—not to want to do it, but to _do_ it, in the face of all that intensity, that power to push her away and bring on the return of her unhappiness—and stepped closer to him, until she was almost touching. He didn't move.

"What's our plan?" she asked quietly.

He didn't reply at first—and then it wasn't "at first" but "at all." His hands were still clenched on his own arms, and he said nothing. She darted a look up to his face and saw that his eyes were shut. She didn't know what to say, so she said nothing, waiting him out.

"I have been intending for some time to fake my death," he said at last, very quiet, "so that fewer people will be looking for me. One can always resurrect from death that is faked. But people don't like it."

She looked from his shut eyes, the tension in his face, the rigidity of his body, the clench of his fingers _._ Slowly, she said, "You're waiting for me to turn around and leave. Still. Aren't you? Sev—"

"I am asking you," he said, his voice low and tight and bordering on angry, "to take a long, hard look at what you will be leaving behind. If you do this, Lily—" Her heart turned over at the sound of his voice wrapped around her name; she swallowed. "—you will be giving up your home, your family, the life you've lead, and the life you could lead with the people whom you are leaving behind for a good, long while. Perhaps forever. You won't be on hand to save them when the days turn dark. They may die, and you won't know it. You will not be allowed to say good-bye. But they will be gone from you."

She wanted him to look at her so that she could prove herself, could hold his gaze. But he didn't open his eyes, and there was cruelty in his face, that vulnerability transformed. He still didn't believe her, she thought, despairingly. Why couldn't he believe that she wanted to go with him, that she was prepared to do whatever it would take?

 

_He doesn't trust you._

The understanding struck her like a blow to the heart, so hard it bruised. Her eyes widened and she actually gasped. And Severus's eyes snapped open and locked on her face.

"There," he said harshly. "Do you see?"

She shook her head fast and hard. "That wasn't what I—"

"You need to _go,"_ he snarled. "Just—"

"No! I—"

"Go back to your perfect future—"

He wasn't even listening to her. God—she'd dithered too long over the proper thing to do and then had done the wrong thing, the exact wrong— "You don't trust me!"

"Of course I don't trust you—" he started, his face stamped with brutal emotion; and then, with an effort that looked like it hurt, he started to close himself off. "I don't trust anyone—"

"No!" She grabbed his sleeve, digging her fingers into his arm. "Don't you dare—don't you shut yourself away from me, Severus. If you want to tell me something, _tell me_. I can't make it _right_ otherwise—"

Cold, so cold, closing off. "I see no reason to—"

"Because," she cried, "I—"

_Love you._

She clapped her hands over her mouth, as if to keep it in. Her eyes felt huge in her face, and her heart pounded. Oh shit.

_You can't say that. If he doesn't trust you, it's the worst thing you could say—_

But she knew—oh God—it had been true for _ages_. It had, it really had. All that time, even when she'd been comparatively happy with James—five years ago when she'd broken with Sev for good and she'd been miserable and aching, stung by the sight of him day after day—writing him hundreds of letters she never sent, even about being pregnant, before she told anyone else—crying with relief and heartache over the names of captured Death Eaters—not budging from his side once they'd met again, in this time—leaving a future that she might have rebuilt and everyone she might have built it with, leaving it all behind for him, blind to almost every other consideration—

It had been so obvious and _she had never understood_.

Her greatest ignorance of all—the most powerful secret of her heart, so plainly in sight—and she had never, ever seen it. She had let everyone persuade her that friendship, understanding and sympathy even, was wrong—that any love, of any kind, would be misplaced, would be impossible toward him—and she had listened to them, not to her own feelings. She had listened to people who hated him, above her own heart that loved him. She'd done everything so wrongly, so exactly the opposite of what she should have—

It had been her greatest betrayal.

And if she couldn't fix it now, she might as well have stayed dead. But she hadn't—she was here; her heart beat, she could move forward—and she knew, with every ounce of her soul, that she was bloody well going to fix what she never should have allowed to break.

Severus was staring at her. She couldn't interpret his expression. She wanted to believe her determination lit her up, that it poured into him like his emotions had rushed into her when they'd connected, but—at least there _was_ expression in his face, however faint. He hadn't shut himself away yet.

She forced her hands down from her mouth.

"You don't trust me," she said, her voice shaking, but she looked him straight in the eye, with all the force she possessed. _Feel this if you can't believe it, Sev, please._ "But whatever you say, whatever you _do—_ whatever you shut away from me, I am not staying here, I'm not going back to Hogwarts, to _—them,_ to bloody anyone else, all right? I don't care if I have to follow you to China and bug you the whole way. Unless you want to—to _Obliviate_ me and stuff me on a bus back to Hogsmeade, I am not. Leaving! You're _too—important_ to me—"

"You're being ridiculous—" Severus said, but there was something wild in his face, some force cracking against his voice.

"I didn't die so I could lose you all over again! It _hurt_ when we—back then—but I pretended it wasn't supposed to— I made myself _miserable_ , for ages—it wasn't what I should have _done._ There's so much I did wrong, but I can't fix it if you won't even _believe_ I want to fix it—"

Something deep inside her twinged, as if a phantom hand had slipped its fingers into her heart and pulled some delicate part of it. It hurt, and for a crazy second she thought she might be having a heart attack. She pressed her hand on her heart, but the pain had receded, now only a ghost.

"What?" Severus demanded. "What is it?"

"Nothing." She shook her head. "Please—" She looked at him, at his face stamped with the expression of all that emotion, the surge that had made her feel dizzy and overwhelmed when she'd connected with it for just a moment. "I know—what I regret. And I—when you were under Contrapasso—"

His eyes widened a fraction, and for a split second, she thought she saw panic.

_"Everything I've done I've done for you, but it was never enough to undo what I wrought against you—"_

Could that mean—? Would that be crueler, or completely perfect? That he—all the time that she—no; he couldn't; not for so long—

But—then—

"I hardly know anymore," she said, feeling dizzy; and now the pain was back, in her heart, little intangible strings tugging. "What's going on—the only thing that seems to make sense is you, right now, and me, when I'm with you. I don't even _know_ about the rest of it . . . "

He didn't say anything. He only stared. She wondered what he was seeing—if he saw her at all . . .

A hissing, rushing noise . . . and a city bus was gliding in front of their stop, its insides glowing with florescent brightness, its hydraulics hissing. The doors clattered open. She heard it, but she didn't look around, and neither did Sev; they didn't move, only stayed staring at each other.

"You two coming?" the driver called. "We don't got all night, you know."

"The—" Severus put his hand out and gripped the side of the bus stop, his face white as paste in the glaring lights. "Come—"

He climbed onto the bus, his movements jerky, and Lily followed, similarly unsteady. He shoved some Muggle change into the till, scattering coins and not bothering to pick them up. If the driver thought this was strange, Lily didn't know; she couldn't look away from Sev. She hadn't said everything she needed to, but what she had said—had it been enough? Would it be enough to make him listen, even if he only scoffed when she was done?

He must have deposited enough change for the both of them because the driver didn't say anything as she edged past, and the doors were clattering shut. Her eyes were fixed on Severus's back, his narrow shoulders, the ridge of his spine that she could see through his shirt when he hunched. Because she was so focused on him, she had to grab for one of the support bars when the bus rocked into motion.

And then she was clinging to the bar to stay upright. Her head was spinning, and her body seemed to be losing power. The bus, with its brightness and strange faces and Sev walking away from her, was blacking at the edges, and the hand inside her, the one that pulled inside her heart . . .

_No no n o_

"S . . . " She tried to reach for his arm, but her fingers slipped off his elbow, ineffectual. The floor, the walls, the ceiling were all tilting, like a capsizing ship. As if in slow motion, she saw him turn, saw his eyes widen ever-so-slightly, and in a flash he'd caught her, but her whole body was losing power, as if she were falling underneath the spell of a slow-moving Petrificus. Sounds were distorted, fading in and out, the light was all blurring together at the center and disappearing at the corners; it was like being underwater, sinking away from the surface. . . and Sev's face above her, the Occlumency eradicated as if it had never been, more feeling than she'd ever seen in anyone but him . . .

Darkness swelled up, and she was pulled down into it, powerless.

* * *

 

He managed to catch her before she hit the floor, but she was a dead weight, and he had to drop to his knees or drop her. The floor of the bus slammed into his kneecaps and her head rolled with a sickening limpness in the cradle of his arm. In the first few, frantic moments, her eyes were still open, focused on his face; then their focus unraveled as they glazed over; then they slid shut, and her whole body slackened, nothing more than that dead weight.

Panic was welling up like rushing water, incomprehensible noise was raging in his head. He felt for her pulse, pressing his fingers against her neck. He almost couldn't find it, his fingers were shaking so hard. But relief submerged him, so powerful it was almost dizzying: he could feel the pulse of her blood, thin but steady. She wasn't dead. She wasn't.

But what the hell was she? He passed his hand over her face, his fingers over her lips; her breath barely touched him. Her skin was cold, the color was gone from it; the heaviness of her body wasn't from sleep but unconsciousness, maybe even deeper than that. It was as if she'd fallen into a coma right in front of him.

Muggles buzzed around him. They were telling him to pick her up and put her on the bench, do this, do that, and the driver was bellowing for everyone to shut up. Too many people—too much noise—

" _Shut the fuck up_!" Severus shouted.

The bus swayed as the driver twitched the wheel; car horns honked on the street. "Jesus, watch it!" said someone.

"She needs a doctor," said someone else.

"So does he, if you ask me," said a third.

"Is anyone here a doctor?" the second voice said.

"Can anyone competent drive a bus?" said a fourth voice.

"Shut it!" said the driver. "What is it's wrong with her, son?"

If they couldn't manage to shut up, there was no bloody way they could help her. _No_ Muggle could help her. Even a wizard might not be able to do anything. Another curse, perhaps—something to immobilize her, that wouldn't harm her—

Or if whatever had brought them here was taking her away again—

_NO_

He needed to be still, to get off this bus, so he could think—stop this—reverse it—

"Let me down," he barked to the driver, rolling her into his arms and pushing himself to his feet.

The bus braked, everything swaying again. The Muggles who'd crowded around him shuffled away like a slow-witted Red Sea as he stood, but no one followed him down onto the street.

He stood on the edge of a small park, a pocket of damp greenery much like the one near the hotel. For a panicked moment, he was afraid they'd gone back to the hotel— _shit_ —but it wasn't. He'd deliberately chosen a bus headed in the opposite direction—at least—he thought he had. Panic was muddling him.

 _Get your shit together_ , he told himself.

His weak adolescent arms were aching from supporting her slack weight. A bench—in the park, maybe—

Yes; right inside. He laid her down on it, supporting her head, not wanting to risk detection by casting any spell to dry the damp on the bench seat. But—without magic—how was he supposed to discover what was wrong with her? If the MLE were crawling around, the risk of detection, the destruction of their safety—

But Lily lay as cold as a corpse, with little more pulse.

_Occlude. You're letting your emotions get the better of you. Stop it, just fucking stop it._

She had kissed him. You're so important to me—I was miserable—I'm sorry—

_Think, DAMN it—_

A cab. That's what he needed. To be moving. They were safer while moving than while keeping still.

With arms like rubber he gathered her up again and carried her out of the dark, dripping park, down the road and into the lights. He could feel his heart striking against her heavy arm. Automobile lamps glared in his eyes; he stopped on the edge of the sidewalk, on a road heavy with traffic, next to a Muggle man smoking and dropping ash into a styrofoam cup.

"Christ. What happened to her?" asked the Muggle, flicking ash.

"Narcolepsy," Severus bit off. "She needs a cab. Hail one."

"Sure thing," said the Muggle, shrugging. "You've got your hands full." He waved his hand in the air, scattering glowing embers and ash, and a black, nondescript car changed direction and swerved over to them. Inside, it smelled like the inside of old shoes.

The driver twisted in his seat to speak through the plastic partition. "Hospital?" he asked.

"No," Severus said curtly, shutting the door with a bang. Lily didn't stir, not even a bit. It had been eight minutes since her eyes had closed. Each one felt like a nail driven into his temple. "The airport. She's narcoleptic."

The driver didn't seem to know what that meant, but either Severus's tone convinced him it was the truth, or it convinced him he ought to pretend it was true. He twiddled the steering wheel and drifted into the sludge of traffic, while Severus knelt on the floor next to the seat and arranged Lily's coat—his coat—to allow her freer room to breathe. Her pulse was still that same, steady slowness, faint and faraway. He could barely feel her breath if he held his fingers close to her lips. Her skin remained like marble, just as warm and lifelike. He flashed back to the Bonding Curse, when she'd slumped against the hospital bed—and then much further back, to the night she'd died—she had lain so much like this.

If the cab driver was looking in the mirror, he might be suspicious—he might be steering them toward the hospital or even the police station—but Severus couldn't bring himself to care. He pushed the hair away from her face, over and over again, smoothing it back, and then gave in to the urge cramping his muscles, and pressed his forehead against hers. He breathed once, twice, three times.

Surreptitiously, he slipped his wand from his sleeve. Keeping it low and blocked by his body, he moved so that the Muggle couldn't see any flickering spell-light and wordlessly cast a simple diagnostic spell, scaled down. A crackle of magic formed in the air above her, showing all functions slowed, as if she were in a deep state of coma.

Except her brain activity was off the charts, as if she were dreaming and casting spells and feeling everything all at once.

He stared, and then shut the spell down before the Muggle could see it. He knew the man hadn't because there hadn't been any squawk, any sudden tumble as he shoved on the brakes.

Severus sank back on his heels. After a few moments, he realized his hand had slid down to hers and wrapped around it. As if she really were a coma patient, and the healers were telling him in kind voices that Talking To Them Helps.

He gripped her hand so hard she must have flinched if she'd been awake. But she remained motionless and cold and—

Gone _._

No. No. He wouldn't allow it. He had risked his life and his sanity, _everything,_ and lost all of it once before. He would not lose it again.

Everything was reversible, and even death was not absolute. Hadn't they proved that? He _would_ make her well again. He would see the color come back into her face and watch her eyes open and settle on him, desperately hopeful—

He had been fooling himself, such a _fucking_ fool, to think he'd ever be able to let her go _—_ even if she wanted to leave. Jesus Christ—had they been placed in arms' reach of each other after _death_ , after so many years divided, so he could push her into Potter's arms and walk off in the other direction? He'd have gone mad if that happened. He had once, already, when he'd been too young to know how to prevent the death of everything he wanted, when he'd been powerless to stop the obliteration of all his hopes, when all his fears had been made solid and worse than he'd even imagined.

He'd been deluding himself, utterly deluded, so much that he felt disgusted with himself. She had forgiven him for his evils; she'd placed trust in him, after everything; she'd left Hogwarts, left Potter lying on the ground not once but twice, to follow himself, and he'd told her, "Go back to Hogwarts"? He'd been fighting for too long to accept conciliation, even in the form of Lily spilling tears and apologies. If she wasn't fighting against him, he'd had to fight against her. Because he didn't know how to let go of anything, whether it was a dead hope or a dead fight. Here was his hope, right in front of him, all the reasons for resentment and loss disseminating like thistledown on the wind, and he'd been doing everything possible to crush hope, because that's what he _did._

He'd been behaving like a silly little Hufflepuff. Who _was_ he, if he simply let her go after every. Bloody. Thing? Because he'd been defeated once, he was going to accept defeat again? Idiot, absolute idiot _—_

The night he'd left Hogwarts, as he headed north, so tightly Occluded he was only thoughts, no feelings, and the starlight glow of her Patronus had alighted from the darkness, blue and silver and glittering, and he'd turned back without a second thought—

He hadn't comprehended any more than she had, but what he'd failed to understand was _himself._

Even now he wasn't sure whether forgiveness was in his power, or trust; all he knew was that letting her go was not. It never had been. He'd only been pretending. He was too good at pretending.

The Dark Lord wasn't the only man who was his own worst enemy. Perhaps they all were, to themselves.

His fingers clenched on the soft seat, curling the soft ends of her hair into his palm.

_Talking to them helps, does it?_

"If you can hear me," he hissed, so low the words were little more than breaths, "come back to me."

* * *

 

She was walking through the Forbidden Forest, so anxious, so full of joy, she thought she might burst—only she had no body, no heart to implode from happiness; she was only a shade, a ghost. She could see blades of grass through her feet.

It was spring again, not frozen winter, and the colors were rich and dark. She imagined she could smell the earth, the scents of resin and bark and leaves, the chill of the night—

And—smoky shapes to her right and her left, each one seeming to grow more real as she recognized them—James—twenty-one-year-old James, not sixteen-year-old-James, and a slightly older Sirius, and Remus. All, like her, smiling, as if they felt their hearts about to burst from love—

And then she saw Harry, all grown up. He looked so much like James—the same hair, the same look of surprise, the same height; but those were her eyes looking back at her, out of that familiar face. That had always so shocked and pleased her, awed her even, made her humble, seeing that blend of herself with someone beloved, in the being of a person she loved more than her own life.

This was what Severus had told her about, she realized. This was Harry on his way to die.

"You've been so brave," she said.

Harry didn't reply. He only looked at her as if he never wanted to do anything else; as if any amount of looking, whether it was five seconds or forever, would never be enough. She felt grief and joy intermingling in the heart she didn't have, flowing through the veins that didn't exist; the love she possessed for this child whose life she had saved by dying. She wanted to say a million things to him, to ask him a million more questions, but she couldn't. There was no time. She knew what would happen, and she needed to be brave.

For Harry. One last time.

"You're nearly there," James said to Harry, his voice floating from her right. "Very close. We're . . . so proud of you."

"Does it hurt?" Harry asked, his voice in a half-whisper, and Lily knew courage like she had never known it before, smiling into the face of her baby now, like this, unable to touch him, to comfort him, to save him; because you only had one shot to die for someone, and it was never a final guarantee. She would rather have died a thousand deaths than stood here, like this, but this was where she stood.

She would stand here a thousand times more if it meant Harry was not alone.

"Dying?" Sirius replied. "Not at all. Quicker and easier than falling asleep."

"And he'll want it to be quick," Remus said. "He wants it over."

"I didn't want you to die," Harry said, his voice full of anguish, remorse, sorrow. "Any of you. I'm sorry—" His eyes focused on Remus, pleading. "—right after you'd had your son . . . Remus, I'm sorry—"

"I'm sorry, too," Remus said gently. Lily wished she could see his face, but she couldn't take her eyes off of Harry. "Sorry I'll never know him . . . but he'll know why I died and I hope he'll understand. I was trying to make a world in which he could live a happier life."

Lily couldn't feel the breeze that passed through the trees, but she saw it ruffle the hair that lay haphazardly across Harry's forehead. She wished with all her heart and soul and being that she were that breeze.

"You'll stay with me?" Harry asked them, looking around at each of them, his gaze lingering again on Lily.

"Until the very end," James said, and Lily's heart ached with love, for all of them, after everything, the way she'd always hung onto the memory of Severus, through everything.

"They won't be able to see you?" Harry asked.

"We're a part of you," said Sirius. "Invisible to anyone else."

Still looking at Lily—his mother; she was his mother, and she always would be, nothing would change that—Harry said, "Stay close to me."

They went where he did; as Sirius had said, a part of his heart. Their world, in that moment, revolved around Harry. Hers had, from the moment he was born. She had lost him, and now here he was, grown and so full of courage and love . . . she could feel it; it had brought them back, to these final moments of his life, to walk beside him.

She found herself gazing at James, who looked away from Harry and met her eyes, his own full feelings exactly like her own, and questions. Just like she'd done with her son, she memorized the sight of her husband, with his crooked glasses and his messy shirt, the way he'd looked the night they had died. And Sirius, and Remus, a little older than she'd ever seen them, but still young, still familiar. A wish darted through her heart, to speak to them, to say a million things, but equally strong was the sense that this was the only time—the only moment—these looks, on Harry's last walk.

This was saying good-bye. A real good-bye, to the people she'd really known and loved, not the shadows she had left behind at Hogwarts. These were her old friends, her old loves.

The last of her old life.

 _Goodbye_ , she thought, looking at all of them. _You'll always be in my heart, like this._

And looking back toward Harry for the last time, she let her hand reach out and press against his back, in the moment before his hand opened and a small black stone slipped from between his fingers, plummeting toward the grass, and sinking her back into the darkness . . .

* * *

 

Lily was crying so hard she could barely inhale enough to release the next sob. She realized someone was touching her, hand on her face, on her shoulder—she could barely see, barely think—she needed—

"Sev," she cried, the syllable of his name disappearing into her tears.

The world shuddered and flung to a halt, and everything tumbled over itself. Lily rolled, crashing into something solid yet yielding; a body—her eyes flew open—Sev—and they thudded to a halt.

"What the bloody hell?" Severus barked, his hands on her, steadying her.

"You get out of my cab right here, son!" said an unfamiliar voice. "I don't know what funny business this is, but I'm taking you no farther!"

"For fuck's sake—"

Lily clawed her hair out of her face, wiped at her streaming eyes, and stared blearily around. "A c-cab?" she hiccoughed. She was still crying. She couldn't stop.

"It's all right, lass," said the cab driver. "You're safe now—"

"Not with an imbecile like you," Severus snarled.

"Sev, w-what's g-going on?" Hiccough, hiccough; she couldn't breathe in without her chest hitching.

"We're getting out." He kicked the door open.

"Wait just a—" said the driver.

Severus snarled, not words this time, but an enraged, animal sound, and snapped his wand out. " _Obliviate!_ " he hissed, and the driver's face went slack, his eyes blank.

Lily stumbled out of the cab on shaky legs, into a fine mist of rain that slid into her disheveled hair and over her hot, clammy cheeks. She dropped to her knees on the damp pavement, the moisture soaking through her trousers.

Severus slammed the car door and looped his arm around her waist, lifting her off the ground.

"Can you walk?" he asked tightly, looking her over, no Occlumency; just Sev, raw and angry. The sight of him wrung her heart, already abused.

She nodded, gulped, and then felt the tears start to pour in earnest again. She couldn't stop crying—as if there were some great pressure on her lungs, and she had to keep sobbing or die—

He didn't ask what had happened, only helped her down the sidewalk, until they reached another covered bus stop. It was chilly there and dimly lit only by the mercury streetlamps nearby, but empty, and the rain was off their heads. Cars hissed past on the road, and a roaring in the distance, high above, sounded like—airplanes?

Severus helped her to sit on the hard bench, and then simply let her lean against him and weep into his shirt.

 _Harry_ , she thought. _Harry—_

When Severus had told her, back on New Years' Eve, that Dumbledore had set Harry up to die so the war could be won at last and Voldemort defeated—she had buried that in her heart, too massive a betrayal to comprehend. She had understood it—she had processed it, on the lightest, most superficial level—it had made her pull back from him in his office—but it hadn't meant everything it should have, everything it needed to, until now. Until she had been forced to look, she hadn't been able to. It wasn't just about choices or about wars, even about deaths or betrayals; not just about innocence, ideals, or hopes now burnt. It was everything. It was all that had been lost.

Her baby—her sweet boy—gone. Really gone.

Her husband—her friends—

Everything that was—

Everything she had been, and known, and loved, and wished for, for so long—

Gone.

Really gone.

And so she cried with the force of a shattered heart, pressed against Severus, her first and last and best friend, while the soft rain fell onto the street outside, and the hush of the planes carved into the silence.

* * *

 

"What happened," Severus said quietly, somewhere between a question and a statement.

With her eyes closed, she saw the forest: Harry looking back at her as if he understood, more than anyone else, what it meant to want what never could be. "I . . . dreamed I was a ghost in a forest." More tears pooled beneath her eyelashes, as if telling her there were some sorrows that would never be spent. "Harry was there."

Severus went very still. She slipped her hand down her side and threaded their fingers together.

"He was going to die." Two cars hushed past, their yellow headlights tracking across her closed eyelids. The light didn't touch the scene in her head: the dark forest, soft in spring, Harry and James and Sirius and Remus around her. "Like you said."

"You were the only one there?" he said after a few moments; but like before, it was between a statement and a question.

"No." She didn't elaborate. Severus didn't need her to. "Then he dropped a kind of black pebble and . . . I woke up."

Yes. She'd finally woken up.

Beneath that bus-stop, clammy tears drying on her face, she felt as changed as she had when the world had filled with green light, blackened, and reformed into the soft shapes and colors of her childhood bedroom, herself alone in her mother's old house, Harry and James gone. She had thought, because she'd still been in a place where everyone existed, could be touched and spoken to, that she'd _come back_ . . . but she hadn't.

Her heart felt cracked open, all her love and longing and loss flowing through her, like a river to the core of the earth. Avada Kedavra was only painless to the body. It had still cut her in half, forced the cruelest separation on her. Perhaps this was the afterlife—perhaps it was a second chance—perhaps it was nothing that could really be explained or understood—but whatever it was, she had passed on from her old life as clearly as if she were walking across clouds toward golden gates. As clearly, but not as cleanly. The truest death had obscured itself.

But even in death, there was rebirth. She had lost so much, but by some miraculous chance, she had found Severus again, whom she had lost in life. The two were separate experiences. One made the other just bearable. It had allowed her to survive dying, this rebirth into what she didn't understand.

Finding him had given her hope.

She was distracted by his chest expanding beneath her cheek when he drew in a sharp breath. "A black pebble?"

"Yes." At last she opened her eyes and tilted her head until she could see his face. "That means something to you?"

"Something to do with Dumbledore." He turned his head slightly, his eyes sliding down to meet hers. His hair tickled her nose, her cheek. She almost smiled, but she ached too much.

"Well?" he said, his voice low, roughened. "Does that make your decision for you?"

She waited a few moments, just looking into the black well of his eyes, wondering if he was picking up on her thoughts, looking inside.

"I wish you could feel what I feel," she said. "Then maybe I could tell you how sorry I am, that I—"

"Not this again," he said tightly, wearily, almost like he wanted to roll his eyes. She almost laughed.

"But I—"

"It doesn't matter."

"But—"

"I have no intention of living a sodding do-over," he said. "Where every slight and wound from the past is paraded endlessly about to answer to the justice of remorse. It's all in another fucking life. If you're only following me to force penance on yourself—" His jaw tightened, emotion flashed in his face. "You should get up and try to leave."

Something . . . light . . . fluttered inside her. "'Try to leave'? That's different."

His eyes glittered in the darkness. "Go on," he said. "Try it."

Wordless, she shook her head, once to each side. She tightened her grip on his hand, pressing their palms together. He didn't pull away. She could feel the rigidity in the bones of his fingers.

"I want you to look inside my mind," she said.

He stared at some point between them, his face turned slightly down. He didn't say anything.

"Then you'll know," she said. "What I feel." _What's in my heart._ "Everything."

"Will I?" he asked, still not looking into her face—into her eyes—as if to do so would be dangerous. "We all barely know even the smallest part ourselves."

"Did Leglimency teach you that?"

"Every minute of every day teaches me that," he said.

She smiled.

Then she kissed him, for the second time. His lips were cold, the skin broken in places. She wondered if her kiss stung. His hair was soft where it fell across her cheekbones, her forehead; his breath seemed to pull her own into him as he inhaled sharply—

His hand wrapped around her shoulder, his grip startlingly real, and he pushed her away. His eyes searched her face. She stared back, wondering if she could learn to master the opposite of Occlumency and Leglimency: pouring your sincerity, your trust, into another, filling them with your longing to be complete. Maybe she already was. She could feel the force of her heart welling, rising, wanting to flow into his own.

The cars hushed past on the road, and the rain made no sound as it fell. She could hear their breathing, her and Sev's. He hadn't turned away from her, or shut himself away.

"What I have been trying to tell you," he said in a low voice, barely audible, "which you have been too thick to comprehend, is that I am not going to let you go." His grip became almost brutal, and she saw that vulnerability opening in his face, the one so raw and tender it was always a hair's breadth away from transforming itself into cruelty. "Even," he said harshly, "if you want me to."

Her heart fluttered in her chest, but not from surprise. She felt like a child gazing into the mirror of eternity, seeing her heart reflected in him, as endless as the cosmos.

"I know," she whispered. "I've been trying to get you to keep me. You just kept saying no."

His breathing was harsh, labored, his gaze so intense she felt flayed to the core. She realized she was trembling. The force of his personality was starting to radiate out from him, and the fine hairs along her body were prickling and rising as a feverish frisson engulfed her from head to toe. She could almost believe that the power of his emotions could unwrap your own, opening them beyond what you could control.

She wondered if this was what Severus was like when he wasn't holding back.

Well, Gryffindors were brave for a reason.

She carded her hand through his hair, starting at his temple and threading through to the ends. His hand came up and gripped hers, so hard he'd probably leave bruises, his fingers sliding down her wrist. His eyes slid half shut; his breath was still harsh and fully audible; hers, by contrast, seemed to be getting threadier.

"I told you," he said, his accent bleeding into his voice, roughening it. "I never thought you were perfect."

"I could have been better," she whispered shakily. _I will be_ —

"So could we all have been," he said.

His eyes open and looked straight into her. He pulled her hand out of his hair and kissed her palm, his other hand sliding into the hair at the nape of her neck. And then he kissed her, really kissed her, for the first time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I neared the end of this story, I realized what I had written wasn't a so much a love story as a good-bye story setting itself up to be a love story. I started with the idea "What would happen if Severus and Lily met up after they'd died?" only to realize I was exploring what the situation meant for them. There was so much shit in their past, and to send them into the past was to need to deal with all of that; but we can only be who we are, not who we've been. To have gone beyond the point where they realized that would have taken me into a different story. It would be nice to write their love story, but this is only its precursor. To deal with all of their feelings, the fits and starts of their relationship together once it really began, might easily have taken another hundred thousand words. 
> 
> I'm certain there are many things I could have done better or worse in this fic. I know there are tons of things I could have done differently. I know my decisions won't universally please, but whatever does? To everyone who read and enjoyed and helped me keep track of myself - as well as to anyone who continues to offer these tidbits now that the story is over - I offer endless thanks for your good wishes, your enthusiasm, your help, and your patience.


	25. Chapter 25

_**June 9, 1977** _

It was the first day after exams were over, and happily enough, the first day in more than two weeks when it hadn't been raining. The heat had come, sudden and sultry, and Remus was out enjoying the first sunshine and the warmth, with a book. His permanently elevated body temperature always ensured he was warm, but there was something psychologically beneficial about sunlight.

 _Another year over,_ he thought.

From the shade of the beech tree beside the lake, he looked across the broad, sloping lawn, idly noting the way groups changed as their members aged. The younger students were clumped by gender, boys together and girls separate; and then, as they grew older, the sexes merged and struck off in single, solitary pairs.

He could see James's messy dark head bent over something Charlotte Marlowe was showing him. She was almost a head and shoulders shorter, blonde and sweet, and rather plump. Back in mid-February, Remus had suggested she ask James for help in Transfiguration. At first Sirius had thought it was a good plan . . . until the first couple of weeks had lapsed, when they'd started to find themselves unable to go anywhere without tripping over James and Charlotte Marlowe together. Then Sirius's enthusiasm had waned, and he'd become sulky and moody.

So Remus deduced that the Lily business hadn't just been about Lily. Oh, it wasn't that he thought Sirius was in love with James; but James was the most important person in Sirius's life. It had been that way since they were eleven. None of his girlfriends ever came close. Even Remus and Peter couldn't match up to James.

Remus had been doing a lot of explaining that James needed some female focus to take his mind off of poor Lily; that if they left Prongs to his own devices, he might build his thoughtless obsession with her into a shrine of affection, now that she was dead. Sirius had no great opinion of Charlotte Marlowe, whom he described as a total goof and a duffer, the sort of person who would lapse into baby talk at the drop of a hat, but he at least had to admit that her present James-worship was better than a lifetime of Lily-worship.

Loads of times in the past few months, Remus had felt he was working toward a career as a psychiatrist. Maybe after he graduated, he ought to check into a Muggle university and get a degree in behavioral sciences. No one would ever believe that a psychiatrist was also a werewolf. Muggles _knew_ there was no such thing. And if your patients were all worried they were off their rockers, they'd never ask why their doctor was unavailable around the full moon every month, even if they did notice.

"How are you getting on, Moony?"

Remus squinted into the sunlight dappling through the leaves. "Hi Peter."

As Peter, smiling, settled in next to him on the fragrant grass, Remus lifted _Animagi through Thie Ages._ "This book is wretched and ghastly and inhuman," he said, making sure it knew he was talking about _it_ in particular.

"It's pretty awful," Peter commiserated. "Do you need me to explain anything to you?"

"I'm still having trouble with the bit about true forms," Remus said. "Does this make any sense to you? 'The postulate or common understanding involved in transformation is certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the bioorganical organism of which the true being is a part, and the ends of which it is an effort to subserve.'"

"It's just stressing the importance of finding your true form," Peter said. "They've got loads of garbage about how you do that, but really, you just need to find the animal that suits you. I kind of think of it like naming a baby. I remember when my aunt was having my cousin, she went through scads of names trying to find the right one, and in the end she named her Antonia. I mean, she probably knew the name Antonia all along, she just never thought of it for her baby. . ."

Remus let Peter talk on, nodding in the occasional right place. It had given Peter such a boost to be able to teach someone a thing he had mastered, a remarkable thing, particularly if the subject was giving his first student trouble. Peter wasn't used to being better than anyone else at anything—not because he _wasn't_ , but because James and Sirius were stars at whatever they did. Remus wasn't pants at Transfiguration, but he was no Padfoot or Prongs, and he didn't want to get stuck as some half-werewolf, half-llama.

It had been Dumbledore's solution: train Remus to be an Animagus, and pretend to put the other three through training, as well. He had expressed admiration for their willingness to help their friend, but deep disappointment that in order to do so, they had overturned rules laid down for everyone's safety. Remus now transformed in a secure room in the castle, where the others joined him at full moon. They'd tried it with just Remus and either James or Sirius, but neither of them could control the wolf alone. For the interim days and nights, Dumbledore had sealed all three of their Animagus forms, for use only when the seal was removed.

That night in Dumbledore's study had been one of the five worst in Remus's life. In a way, it had even outclassed the two absolute worst—being bitten and almost killing Snape—because it had been the result of his own failure. He hadn't known, then, how he'd managed to endure the sight and pressure of Dumbledore's gravity, his disappointment. Sometimes, he still didn't know. He guessed it was like the transformations: you endured because you had to.

"Under normal circumstances," Dumbledore had said, with no trace of any smile, "the risk all of you have placed upon the safety of all our students would lead to expulsion. I had hoped that after the regrettable incident with Mr Snape last year, you would have understood the dangers of having a werewolf for a friend; the danger that Mr Lupin does not pose to you, but to those who do not realize that a werewolf, when transformed, has none of the moral checks that I know Mr Lupin to possess." And then his light blue eyes had settled on Remus, and he'd uttered the words that had shriveled Remus's soul to the size of a pea. "Or that I thought he possessed. Now, I fear I am not so certain."

Sirius and James had been vociferous in defending him, Sirius even getting to his feet, but Remus had told them to shut up. "You don't know what it's like, to transform," he said, shaking, feeling sick. "To lose your mind. You didn't know how dangerous it was. I did. This is my fault. I should be the one to leave school."

"No, Mr Lupin," said Dumbledore. "To err is human, and to face our failings and seek to change them for the better is the best part of our humanity. I am afraid, however, that I can no longer trust the four of you in the matter of Mr Lupin's transformations."

And then he'd looked . . . sad. "I owe you a sincere apology, Mr Lupin. I should not have left your transformations in the hands of others. It was a failure in me—perhaps the greatest failing in the room—for if I have treated your condition lightly, how can I expect youth to comprehend the danger and the difficulty? All we may do now is act to correct ourselves. We tell ourselves 'better late than never' because it would be fatal to do otherwise."

As far as Remus understood, the investigation was swept quietly under the government rug; a few discreet favors Dumbledore called in at the Ministry. Remus offered to resign his Prefectship, but Dumbledore had still refused. "You have taken a responsible step, Mr Lupin, and the greatest beneficiary is yourself. But we must not stop with our first progression."

So Remus had steeled his intention to be firmer with James and Sirius about all the hexing-for-fun and the pranking . . . and then he hadn't had to implement it, because they hardly even joked about it any more. It was as if, with everything that had happened in the past few months, they'd all been forced by life to grow up.

It was easier to sleep at night, now, but harder, sometimes, to live with himself during the day. It was funny how that worked. Maybe he _would_ become a psychiatrist. He sure knew a lot about human failing. It would be nice to understand how the brain worked, because half of the time it seemed not to.

James and Charlotte Marlowe were skiffing across the bright, rippling grass toward the beech tree. Charlotte, he saw, was carrying a small roll of violet parchment.

"Hello, hello," she said, beaming at Remus and Peter as soon as she was within distance. "Isn't it a lovely, lovely day?"

"Hey Moony, Wormtail. You've got an admirer, Moony," said James, pointing at the violet parchment cylinder that Charlotte was now offering to Remus.

"Professor Dumbledore asked me so very kindly if I could give it to you, Remus," Charlotte said as he took the summons to his weekly meeting.

"Thanks, Charlotte." He tucked the horrid Animagus book underneath his arm and unfolded from the grass, offering Charlotte his seat with affected gallantry that made James grin. "Well, I'm off to the tumbril. Catch you lot later."

"Try not to let your head roll," said James, waving.

Dumbledore wasn't an Animagus, but there were limits to what he could tell McGonagall without landing the Marauders in trouble or herself. Dumbledore had told Remus that although his contacts in the MLE had dismissed the case, he could never be sure it wouldn't ever crop up again in some other form. As far as McGonagall knew, Remus and the others were learning for the first time with the Headmaster's sanction.

"But Snape was the one who submitted the information," Remus had said. "And now that he's . . . that he's dead, it shouldn't come up again, should it?"

"One cannot map all avenues of any given incident, Mr Lupin. But from what little I knew of Mr Snape, at the end, I believe he came quite close."

There were times when Remus didn't really believe Snape was dead. It was usually at night, when he was alone, aimlessly counting sheep in the crimson-tinted darkness of his four-poster now that he had no _present_ guilt weighing on his heart. He would remember Snape's personality radiating out from him like a corona, the gritty cadence of his voice, his McGonagall-like patience-that-wasn't, the ease with which Dark magic came to him, and he would think that of course Snape had faked his death, his and Lily's, and run off somewhere that wasn't England, like maybe Mexico or Egypt or Hawai'i, where maybe people wouldn't be so horrible to him. But during the day, when rain drummed against the windowpanes or the corridors filled with buttery sunlight, it just seemed like dream-fancy. Then, the truth was that Snape had run off from Hogwarts and Lily with him, and they'd run afoul of Death Eaters in Edinburgh and died.

The weirdest part was that now James, whenever he thought about Snape, would get a very serious look on his face and say, "I was wrong about him." Apparently, all Snape had needed to do to get James thinking he'd been an "all right bloke after all" was be murdered by Death Eaters. James had taken it as proof that Snape had told them "no" and then died rather than say "yes."

Remus had wanted to tear at his hair. Yes, psychiatry was looking really productive. He could make a fortune off his friends alone.

More than a few times, Remus had wondered how much of James's Snape-bullying had been fed by Sirius. James would do anything for Sirius if he believed Sirius wanted or needed it.

It was all water dried up under the bridge that had been burnt to ash, in any case.

Dumbledore's violet scroll wanted to meet him in the Room of Requirement, the place where Remus transformed. It was a space that could become anything, as long as you wished hard enough. Peter was the one who'd found it—years ago, in fact; but he'd kept it to himself, until something had come of sharing it. "Just something about it," he'd told Remus. "It felt like a secret."

More than sometimes, Remus wondered about Peter.

Now, once a month Remus paced up and down in front of an empty stretch of wall and asked for the forest, and it grew out of the stones of the castle, made from thought and longing and wistfulness. Its grass was as soft as he wanted it, and the air was filled with the scent of pine and earth. It was always spring, and flowers bloomed in the night.

None of the others could get the forest, not even Dumbledore. When he asked, he received an orchard with rows of apple trees; James got a bright, grassy field dotted with wildflowers; Peter wouldn't try, and Sirius only came up with a bleak, empty stretch of seashore. Remus decided that when he asked for the forest, he wasn't asking for a place; he was asking for a feeling. When he'd run with his friends, he hadn't felt alone. In a strange way, because of what they'd done for him, the nights that had nearly broken him as a child had become his reason for surviving.

It was far better this way, though. He should never have allowed his own need to subsume the safety of others.

Dumbledore was right: you told yourself it was never too late to make up for a failure, because to do otherwise would make living impossible; just as impossible as living with other people without the ability to forgive, to let go; to move on from the past, when the past was wrong or filled with grief.

When he reached the seventh floor corridor, the door was already formed, made of cherry-wood and bursting with carven vines. He pulled on the handles and walked into Dumbledore's orchard, on a fine day as bright as the one outside, blue skies and sunlight and the scent of summer.

Dumbledore was sitting in a chair wrought from the stump of a tree, formed into a low seat with cornflowers blooming at its roots, the exact color of his robes. He was twisting a chain out of the cornflowers, the way children did, girls mostly. When he heard the crunch of Remus's approach, he looked up and smiled. Every time Dumbledore smiled at him, Remus told himself he had no business feeling relieved.

"Ah, Mr Lupin," Dumbledore greeted. "Punctual as ever. Do sit down, won't you?"

 _I may not have any moral fiber,_ Remus thought, _I may needlessly endanger lives with my eternal self-absorption, but I'm always on time._

"Thank you, sir." Rather than creating a chair, Remus sat on the grass. He started to get up again when Dumbledore moved from his stump-chair to the ground next to him.

"No, no, my dear boy," said Dumbledore. "Please. It's been too long since I sat on the most natural of seats."

Remus lowered himself back to the grass, folding half-lotus with the Animagus book to one side and his bag to the other.

Dumbledore continued smiling, his fingers working as if by habit on his cornflower-chain. "And how progress your studies?"

"This book was written by a sadist, sir," Remus said. "I'm convinced of it."

Dumbledore chuckled. "Tiberius Thorne, wasn't it? Not a man who thought in a straight line, I'll admit."

"He thought in concentric circles, sir."

Dumbledore smiled, eyes sparkling quietly. "But the most important stage is finding your true form, and I wouldn't think Tiberius Thorne could interfere too much with that, do you?"

"I don't know how to find it, though," Remus said. He plucked at the grass. It was cool beneath his fingers. "I'm trying the book, because I've already tried all of James's and Sirius's exercises. I've meditated, I've looked at encyclopedias, hundreds of images of animals, but nothing seems right."

"May I ask if there's one that seems wrong?" Dumbledore asked, with that x-ray gaze.

Remus looked down at his own knuckles. "I . . . I keep getting hung up on a wolf. But it doesn't— _feel_ right."

"Does it feel wrong? Or do you wish it did?"

With all his effort, Remus repressed his instinctual revulsion and tried to honestly think about it.

"It feels right in some ways," he said slowly, "but wrong in others."

"The werewolf is your other form because of a curse," said Dumbledore. "You are inseparable from the wolf now, but you were not born that way. The werewolf may be influencing your true form—in fact, I would bet my best hat on it—but it does not control you."

"It feels like it does," Remus said quietly.

"It controls your body once a month," Dumbledore said. "And it subsumes your conscious mind. But is your mind the wolf's? Is the wolf's mind yours? I cannot answer these questions, as no one has seriously studied the werewolf, with sympathy and a desire to truly learn, in all the centuries we have co-existed. You and your friends have come closer than anyone, I believe. It's my wonder whether your transformation into an animal, under your own power, keeping your own mind, might bring clarity to that part of you which is, to you, as unknowable as the dark side of the moon. Well." He smiled slightly. "As the dark side of the moon to humans who must always remain on Earth. I understand Muggles have made it. Isn't that fascinating? For all that many wizards believe we are superior to our wandless brethren, we have never walked on the moon."

Remus wondered if he would be stuck as a werewolf if he went to the moon, or if that would be the one place where he would never need to transform.

"Muggles have science," Remus said. "It's their kind of magic."

Dumbledore nodded slowly, considering him. "Yes, Mr Lupin," he said. "I believe you're right. Your mother is a scientist of sorts, isn't she?"

"She's a doctor. She studies cancer—it's a disease Muggles get that doesn't have a cure, yet." It was more than a bit ironic that her son should have contracted a wizarding disease with no cure.

"And your father?"

"Well, he's a wizard, but he does art. Sculptures and things, mostly. They're all really rotten," Remus admitted.

Dumbledore smiled. "So you've a Muggle scientist for a mother, and a wizard artist for a father. And you, a werewolf, transform from a quiet young man into a magical creature once, sometimes twice a month. So many parts of you that are not easily reconciled, I believe."

"I don't know, sir," Remus said. "The science-magic bits are easy enough."

"Oh?" Dumbledore asked, like he really wanted to know.

"Well . . . science and magic both exist," Remus said. "Just like the moon has both sides, I guess. If you ignore one or the other, you're not seeing the . . . the whole picture, are you?" He was sounding stupid again, he would bet.

But Dumbledore continued to smile, quietly. Then he did one of his Dumbledorian-non-sequiturs. Tiberius Thorne wasn't the only one who operated in concentric circles. "Who healed your eyes, Mr Lupin? Back in January, when Mr Mulciber's curse had blinded you."

Remus blinked. "It was . . . Snape, sir. I . . . thought maybe you'd known. . . ?"

"It seemed to be the only logical explanation," Dumbledore said. "But I must admit I couldn't see why Mr Snape would have done such a thing. In general, I would have hesitated to credit him with any selfless act, let alone toward one of his—forgive me—his enemies."

"I wouldn't have either," Remus said honestly. "I mean, he immediately called the MLE on James and the rest, but . . . I kind of felt like healing my eyes was separate. Like he could be mean and nice at the same time."

Dumbledore nodded. "Both sides," he said. "One picture. I wasn't wrong, Mr Lupin, when I said that your perspective was unique. You try to understand when others fail to see the need, and you ask questions while others maintain convictions. When you let yourself. But I think you have spent so long mistrusting yourself, that you never bothered to take a closer look at _you_. That, I believe, is why you failed this past winter."

Remus's guilt felt like a stone in his throat, but he nodded. "Yes, sir."

Dumbledore's eyes were oddly compassionate. "No one knows how far the wolf's control extends, Mr Lupin. If you are brave enough to find out—if you have the courage—I believe you could be the first to know. You did not go wrong in letting your friends begin to guide you. But we must all guide each other, or we will all wind up lost."

Then his smile returned, light and cheerful. "And so will time be lost, if I chatter for too much longer. Please do enjoy the afternoon, Mr Lupin. It is a beautiful one indeed."

"Thank you, sir," said Remus. Gathering his things, he climbed to his feet. At the door, he paused and looked back. Dumbledore was drifting up the row of apple trees, looking into the sky.

To hell with this book, Remus thought as the door thumped shut behind him. He wanted to go find Sirius, and then join James and Peter, Charlotte Marlowe if she was still there. He was through with studying for today. Maybe the answer would come to him tonight as he counted sheep. Maybe it had something to do with his dream of running through snowy mountains, where the stars were so bright and clear, he believed he could climb them into the sky and ask the moon to let him go.

He was shoving the book onto his desk when he heard tapping at the window: the sharp rap of an owl's beak. But when he turned, he saw that it wasn't an owl: it was a kind of dove, soft gray with a white breast.

Curious, he let it in. A note from Charlotte to James? But the dove landed on _his_ bed, and then collapsed from exhaustion.

He scooped it up as gently as he could and let it lave a bit of water from James's owl's dish. Then he settled it on Maximus's empty perch and went back to the letter, curious about who could be sending him letters via doves who'd obviously flown such a long way they fainted from exertion.

The letter was folded into a perfect square and sealed with a blob of bright green wax. When he touched the paper—not parchment; just regular stationery paper—it flashed, rippling all over with golden light; the wax shimmered, glowing emerald; and then the seal cracked. Now more curious than ever, he unfolded the envelope and pulled out three sheets of Muggle stationery paper, written close-through, front to back, in a very familiar hand whose looping g's looked like rosebuds.

 _Lily?_ he thought, as stunned as if he'd glimpsed her in a crowd. He flipped to the last page, searching for the signature, and read, _Lots of Love, Guess Who_

If there weren't cheerful daylight pouring in through the diamond window-panes, he'd believe this in a heartbeat.

But right now, as he turned to the first page, his hands were shaking, rustling the paper gently.

* * *

 

_Dear Remus,_

_This letter is spelled to open only to you, so if you're reading it, you must be you. If anyone else touches it, it will self-destruct—either before it's opened or after—so you might not want to let Sirius or James get hold of it before you've read it, because I've such a lot to tell you._

_First off, I'm not dead, and I'm so sorry you had to believe I was. I always thought we were friends, and I know that if you had pretended to be dead and I'd grieved for you, I'd be upset to find out I'd hurt for nothing. I'd be so relieved, but still hurt. Please know I didn't do it for a lark. It was necessary for my safety, and for everyone's, I think, because I'm not who everyone thought I was._

_You'll probably think I've cracked, by the time you're done reading this sentence, but I'll tell you anyway: I'm from the future._

_Okay, it looks really crazy. I'm embarrassed to write it out. To think I even thought of telling you a long time ago, back in January, when it happened! I thought it was sensible, although I later realized I shouldn't do it, not then._

_But this is what happened: in 1998, on May 2, in a final battle between our sides, Voldemort murdered me, for a long list of reasons; but instead of waking up where I thought I would—in Purgatory or as a reincarnated water buffalo—I woke up in my bedroom in my mum's house, with a calendar telling me it was just before Christmas in 1976. I had no idea what was going on. I remembered dying. Avada Kedavra—green light. It was everywhere. I still have nightmares about it sometimes._

_I'm writing this to you because I think you're the best at keeping secrets. Since I'm from 1998, I can tell you that I know you're a werewolf. But I know loads of other things about the war, and about Voldemort, that would be really dangerous to tell the wrong person. Things about how we defeated him the first time . . ._

* * *

 

_**July 31st, 1979** _

Today was Harry's birthday.

At least, in Lily's heart. In the here and now, he didn't exist, and wouldn't have today in any case. He would have been born on this day next year.

But you couldn't replicate the exact circumstances of a life, neither the moment of conception nor its natural course thereafter. As soon as she'd opened her eyes in her bedroom in Cokeworth, remembering the world tinged with green light, everything had changed. The understanding hadn't come on her at once, but the truth had always been there, waiting to be acknowledged.

She _liked_ the change. It was simplistic even to give it a word as frail as "liking." It was more like a state of transcendent joy—muted but pervasive, filling the world like sunlight. The way she'd felt when she'd become a mother: as if life before had existed on a scale with interminable shades of gray, like the twilight before the dawn when you waited for the sun to rise and drench the world in color. She had fought for that dawn, long after she'd thought it would have risen easily. Even when the distance seemed interminable, she'd pushed forward, always learning a new difficulty just as she'd conquered the one she'd understood.

She supposed oversimplifying Severus was a character failing in herself that she would never fully master. In a weird way, she loved that about him.

But she still missed Harry. She supposed that was for always. As if her heart were the ocean and her thoughts were the moon, and her heartache shifted like the flowing tide. Ebb and flow.

The sun was high and bright today. The garden leaves tickled at the kitchen's window casement. She wondered where Severus was. In the garden, probably. According to him, he'd spent most of thirty-eight years shut up in dark rooms; if he were to be believed, he was making up for it double-time. Since they'd ended up here on this island two springs ago, he had been known even to insist on prowling around outside during winter in a downpour. In the summer, she had to get out of the house to see him.

She swung the back door open, leaving the cool interior of the house for the hot brightness outside. The smell of the sea came back to her on the wind; the air was dry and the sunlight was thick. It was odd how sunlight gained different properties the further south you moved. Heat was _different_ in the Cyclades. As if there was more to it.

The garden was massive. Severus worked like a demon when you let him loose. In a little over two years, he had a garden that probably would have got a mention in the herbologist's canon after Eden and Babylon. He'd used magic on it, of course, although the exact specifics were over Lily's head. It stood out, a bright patch of verdant beauty on their arid bit of headland. He had practically every local plant one could cultivate, from hellebore and heliotrope to crocuses and poppies, and beyond. He had an apple and pear trees, date palms and pomegranates, grape vines and olives. Despite all those years of herbology, Lily had never quite understood that gardening, even magical gardening, was a science. It was fiddly and exacting, and it suited Severus down to the ground.

Their neighbors on the island called him "pharmakis _,_ " with good-natured smiles. He'd told her it was the Greek word for "witch." She didn't think their neighbors _knew_ , but she thought it was amusing all the same.

Normal people puttered in their gardens, but Severus prowled. At the moment, he was prodding his grape vines. He looked up at the sound of her bare feet crunching the dirt, wiped his forehead, smearing a long streak of dirt over his eyebrows, and navigated around a patch of narcissus toward her.

"Are you feeling unwell?" he asked.

"No, I'm fine," she said. "I just . . . wanted to come outside."

Sometimes she thought Leglimency wasn't a probe but a magnet; that it absorbed as much as it pierced. Her aches and joys seemed to fall into the dark well of his eyes, the same color as the sea at night, or the spaces between the stars.

"You saw the paper," he said.

She nodded, just barely. She was afraid that if she did more, she'd wind up jumping and screaming and then she would trip and take a tumble. "You could have woken me up, you know. 'Dark Lord Defeated'—that's a headline to trump sleep."

"You need rest," he said, stern, somehow managing to do that Severus-thing where he snubbed you in the same breath that he showed he cared.

"You're a worrywart," she said. "It's one of your charms."

"And you're reckless. You could be sitting now, at least."

She let him brush plants out of the way for her and followed him beneath the cooler shade of the arbor, where the scent of cypress was strong. He'd hung a swing-bench there, made of wood, facing across the rolling sweep of the land to the cradle of the sea on the horizon.

The wood creaked when she lowered herself to it, careful to adapt to her new center of gravity. It seemed a bit different every day; something she automatically adjusted to, and yet had to think about every moment.

"Sit," she said, patting the bench beside her. Severus obeyed, although not like one prepared to relax. But then, Severus hardly ever relaxed. She used to think he was waiting for something—for an attack, and maybe he always would be—but in the past two-and-then-some years she'd learned that Severus just operated at a higher frequency than most people. He couldn't be tranquil. He'd rest when he was really dead, for good. And she could believe that he never really would be; that no matter where he wound up, he'd simply keep going, radiating intensity.

The glitter of sunlight on the water in the distance filled her eyes with motes of brightness. "Can you believe he's really gone?" she asked quietly.

"If they didn't bungle it," Severus said, and then sighed, pressing a finger between his eyebrows. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist, pulling his hand away, and kissed the crease of his frown.

He smoothed his thumb across her cheekbones and kissed her mouth.

They sat together in the silence created by the absence of human voices, when the world is filled with the cadence of its own voice. The wind through the pine needles and the leaves on the vines, the tree branches, the bushes; across the rocky earth and over the water. The thin sound of a dove, calling from the pomegranate tree.

"A fitting birthday present for your son," he said.

Lily tensed. She couldn't help it.

"Although I realize the actual event occurred some days ago," he said, "the headline belongs to the thirty-first."

She glanced up at him. He wasn't looking at her but over the water, his eyes slightly squinted against the glare even in the shade.

"You didn't want to talk about it last year," he said. "Should I assume the same this year?"

"There's nothing to say, really." The wind husked through the leaves, pushing her dyed hair into her eyes. "It means a lot to me that you know."

He didn't say anything. She laced her fingers through his, and then pressed his palm against the roundness of her stomach. The baby kicked out against the pressure, and she smiled.

"This isn't a replacement, you know," she said.

Severus finally looked her in the eye. His own gaze was . . . considering.

"If you need a replacement . . ." he started, but then he didn't finish.

She folded both her hands over his, where they rested on the swell of the new baby. The baby that wasn't Harry. The baby that would be _different._ The baby that would grow up loved, and happy, and live as long and full a life as she could give. In a handful of weeks, it would be born into a world without Voldemort.

It had been one of the hardest decisions she'd ever had to make, turning away from fighting, even though she'd known that staying would have been harder still. The danger to Sev had decided her. If Voldemort and the Order would both see him as a threat, there could be no other option than to disappear. She had gone into hiding once before to protect her family; this time, she'd done it to protect Sev. And this time, she'd been determined: she wouldn't be useless, she wouldn't just wait for Voldemort to show up at the door, to tear her away from everything all over again. She'd make sure he was _gone_ so they could all live as they were meant to, free of him.

For months she had written down everything Severus told her of the future, each scrap of information reawakening her grief, as if she'd only put it to bed at night and stirred it in the morning. It had affirmed her resolve to make this go-around different for _everyone_. All she'd had to offer was Sev's knowledge, through her own voice; his experiences masquerading as her own, as he'd convinced her that Remus would be more likely to trust information if he believed it came from her. And then this morning she'd unfolded the _Oracle_ to the headline she had always dreamed of reading, and beneath it, a photograph of the Order with Dumbledore in the center of so many faces she recognized, so many people she still carried in her heart, alive and laughing together as they were toasted by cheering crowds. The picture had sent joy and grief coursing through her like a glittering brook.

She prayed their triumph would be as real and as lasting as hers had been.

Now she laced their fingers together, hers and Sev's. She remembered Harry's tiny hands, wrapped around her finger. By now, this unborn baby already had fingerprints.

Her heart aching with love and with longing, she said, "This is what I need."

"I just pray it doesn't like Quidditch," Severus said.

Lily smiled so that her face hurt. "Quit calling it an 'it,'" she admonished, freeing one of her hands to prod Severus in the shoulder. It probably hurt her finger more than him; his upper arms were nothing but wiry muscle.

He prodded the much softer and more ample softness on her thigh. "You just did the same."

"Say 'he.' Or 'she,'" she added.

"There's a fifty-fifty chance it won't be what we get used to calling it. If we say 'he' for the next six weeks and it's a girl, or 'she' for the same and it's a boy, we'll feel awkward when it pops out."

"You're being silly. We won't care when it gets here." Not that she knew, precisely; she and James had called the baby a "he" and that's what they'd got. She knew also that Severus didn't want a boy, although he'd never said precisely why. The most she'd ever got out of him was, " _You'll be a much better role model for a daughter than I would be for a son._ "

She often wondered whether he feared she would treat their son as a phantom of her first. To be honest, she wasn't entirely sure she would be strong enough to resist the temptation. Even though, when asked, she told their neighbors, "We'll be happy with either," she secretly wanted this to be a girl, too.

"I just hope it doesn't get my nose," said Severus. "Whatever it is."

"I like your nose." When his only reply was a ripping snort, she wound her arms around his neck and kissed it. He smelled like sweat and grass and wind and earth. She kissed his mouth; he kissed back. His hair was soft, draping around her face; the contours of his shoulders and stomach and hips were solid lines against her.

He lifted his hands and trailed them up her sides. "That feels bizarre."

"What does?"

"I can feel it kicking."

In the position they'd twisted to, legs entwined as much as they could be, the baby was resting the cradle of his hips. She smiled. "How do you think I feel? I can feel it when I'm trying to _sleep_."

"It feels like it's training to be an aquatic acrobat."

She laughed. "At least that's not Quidditch, right?"

Pulling some on the hanging chain and the rest on his hand, she maneuvered herself to her feet. "Come for a walk with me."

"A celebratory walk," he said, keeping his hand in hers.

"Not much else I can do, like this."

"Keeping that in mind, we _won't_ go far."

They navigated past the house, part of Severus' strict routine: he always wanted to net the house in wards, Just In Case. They had faked their deaths in Scotland, left no trail as they slipped into the world of Muggles; Lily had even dyed her hair dark brown, and Severus' skin had shown a remarkable ability to tan. They were, she thought, virtually unrecognizable; but whenever she tried to point this out, Severus would just give her a look, and she would fall silent.

"It isn't worth the price of being wrong," he would say. And then the subject would be folded away into silence.

He dipped into the house to summon her sunglasses and hat from the kitchen counter, along with a thermos of water. She never tanned; she only freckled, and too much of that strong, filling sunlight made her dizzy. She loved it, but she was better off in the shade. There weren't a lot of trees on the island, but she'd got in the habit of wearing wide-brimmed hats and dark sunglasses. They had the added benefit of rendering her even more incognito.

"If you start feeling lightheaded," he said, "you _will_ tell me."

She settled her sunglasses on her nose, smiling. "Sometimes I think you'd be happier if I was the sort of person who lay around on divans all day, sighing about how ill I was."

"I'd have fewer gray hairs, at least."

"You don't have _any_ gray hairs."

They crested along the top of their hill and curved down toward the low cliffs, stirring up the dry summer dust. Her hand drifted from the small of her back to her stomach to Severus, touching his shoulder or his hand as she needed. Sometimes she wondered if that Bonding Curse were fully gone, because there were times when not touching him felt like a bereavement.

They came to the edge of the land, where the cliffs dropped down toward the water. "This way," Severus said, turning his face so she could hear him over the gentle lufts of the wind. He put out his hand and she wrapped hers around it, following his lead to the left, where from a distance the land seemed to hiccup.

Severus drew her to the edge of the hiccup, and she peered over. Below, the sea had carved out a kind of grotto. It dropped straight down, almost the same circumference at the bottom as at the top. She could hear the rush of the water flowing into the inlet, like the roar of the ocean inside a seashell.

"This is weird," she said.

"It's a wishing well."

"It doesn't _look_ like a well . . ."

"Figuratively speaking, then," he said. "Aren't I supposed to be the pedantic one?"

She nudged him with her elbow. "How do you know, then, Mr Smarty Pants?"

"'Wishing well' is what Mythia calls it. Apparently there's a way to walk down into it, but I didn't think it was advisable with . . . this." He gestured at the baby, which dealt her insides a sleepy kick.

"I didn't know we had a wishing well practically in our back yard." She peered over the edge again, smiling when Severus' grip on her hand became almost crushingly tight. At the bottom of the drop, the seawater glittered, the sun glistening on the foam. "Have you made a wish?"

"Perhaps I have," he said. "Perhaps I haven't."

"How long have you known about it?"

"I don't recall," he said with careless indifference, but she knew Severus never forgot anything, ever. Not without being Obliviated; and as they'd seen, he could find a way around that. Mythia had told him about the well—or perhaps he had found it and asked; in fact, that was most likely—and he had kept it to himself until now.

Severus was too savvy to let coincidence surprise him, if he could prevent it. It was significant that he'd left off telling her about a nearby, mysterious wishing-well until the anniversary of her first child's birth. Her lost baby's birthday.

"What am I supposed to wish for?" she asked, looking him straight in the eye, through the dark screen of her lenses.

His returning gaze was unwavering. The well of his emotions pushed at the edges of her mind, as strong as a tidal force, but holding back; just enough to connect, to let her feel he was there. Whenever he did that, her heart ached with tenderness.

"Whatever you want, I should imagine. I doubt there's a guidebook."

Still holding his hand with her right, she looked down into the well again. Her left hand had risen to settle onto their baby, who prodded her.

She wondered what it meant that even though everything had changed, she still remembered Harry as if she'd held him in her arms only that morning. Severus still remembered him, too; she knew that, without having to ask. If everything had changed, shouldn't those memories have changed as well, or merged with new ones? Nothing in her past was different. It existed as purely as she remembered it, and the future remained as soft and unknowable as the darkness when all the lights were out, and she lay next to Severus in their bed, listening to the sound of his breath.

Closing her eyes behind her dark lenses, she let the briny scent of the sea, the soft-rough texture of the wind and the warmth of the sun enfold her. She felt for that tide of longing and joy that flowed through her like the most powerful current of the oceans, and pictured the water flickering softly with the sun and the tide at the bottom of the wishing well. And she thought, _Wherever Harry is, whatever happened to him, I hope he can be happy, like this._

For a moment, it was almost as if the world held still; as if time were fabric that was suddenly caught on the axle of a single moment. Her ears hollowed out; her breath stopped. And then it was all moving again, as if nothing had happened anywhere outside of her own head.

She blinked her eyes a few times. Severus was gripping her hand painfully hard.

She turned to smile at him, tipping her glasses down and squinting in the brightness. "There," she said. "Wish made."

"I'll hazard it was an eminently Gryffindor wish."

"Don't sell Slytherin short. . ."

They took the long way back to the house, the path that unfurled around the base of the hill, rather than the one that climbed it. She enjoyed the sight of their house every time she saw it: a modest, square white building, blinding in the summer sunlight, embraced by the garden that unfurled to all sides. She would pause at the garden gate, breathing in the scents, of pine and earth and flowers, and think, _I'm home._

"I'm hungry," she announced.

"Color me unsurprised," he said. "I suppose you'll want to raid my olive tree."

"The heart wants what it wants. And right now, it wants to rest."

They drew to a stop. She leaned on him, her back (among other things) throbbing, and wrapped her arms around his waist, leaning her head on his chest. One of his hands curved over her shoulder.

"I love you," she said, and waiting, smiling, for his answer.

"So you claim," he said. She moved her lips in time with each word.

"Do you love me?" she asked, the way she always did.

"Don't be foolish," he said, like always, his breath warm against her forehead.

He had never said it, but he didn't have to. Just as she hadn't had to wish for their happiness, down there on the edge of the well.

You didn't have to wish for what already existed.

_The End_


End file.
